Investec Cape Town Art Fair: A Contemporary Art Collaboration at the Mount Nelson Hotel

Investec Cape Town Art Fair and the Mount Nelson Hotel, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town, recently launched their second exhibition collaboration, which took place on Tuesday 23 May at the Mount Nelson Hotel and thereafter has been open to the public from Wednesday 24 May until Monday 28 August.

This is part of an ongoing partnership that celebrated its beginning a week prior to the 10th edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair, in February. The inaugural exhibition was curated by Amogelang Maledu, titled Today, I wish to talk to your dreams. With its exploration of visions and nightmares, the exhibition made salient observations about the historical moment.

The second exhibition will once again celebrate the synergy between these landmark spaces. Both are intrinsic to Cape Town’s cultural calendar – the iconic Pink Lady, as the Mount Nelson Hotel is affectionately known due to her signature pink exterior, at the heart of the city and the art fair, providing an ongoing showcase for the country’s creative achievements – bringing history, heritage, and thought-provoking artwork into one shared moment.

Titled An Endless Night, the new exhibition is curated by Curator Anelisa Mangcu.

Referencing the everyday, Mangcu’s perspective hones in on the pressures of ordinary existence: “We fill up our time with tasks, purpose, duty and creating memories, in hopes of taking our subjective existence seriously with intrinsic value. This way, we create value by affirming time and living it, and not simply obsessing over its passing.

Anico Mostert I

“Time is our scarcest resource. It is completely non-renewable. The artists in this exhibition are encouraged to explore the passage of time that allows questions to unfold, characters to be drawn and findings to be resolved.”

The art pieces to be exhibited make up an extraordinary collection, whose juxtapositions will comment on geographic, gender and historical specificities of time. These include sculptor and conceptualist Mary Sibande, photographer and multimedia stylist Trevor Stuurman, social realist painter Mongezi Gum, multidisciplinary artist Kimathi Mafafo as well as other significant artists to be announced.

Laura Vincenti, Director of Investec Cape Town Art Fair, concurs, “Our partnership with the Mount Nelson Hotel is now well underway, and inThe exhibition ‘An Endless Night’ is open to the Mount Nelson Hotel guests and the public from Wednesday 24 May to Monday 28 August. The exhibition will be displayed in different areas of the hotel. its second extraordinary moment. We are thrilled, as the art fair, to see how an idea can become an integral part of the local culture in such a short space of time. Commitment to new ideas takes drive, skill and admiration for creativity, which is what we all bring to this project. We wish the incumbent curator Anelisa Mangcu well with her exhibition, knowing that through this event she is broadening horizons, and understanding, for the participating artists, and for the city itself.”

Mount Nelson Hotel General Manager Tiago Sarmento explains “arts and culture are inherent to Belmond’s DNA as we have a long-standing history of nurturing passionate relationships with arts communities around the world. Thus, this feels like a natural partnership, not only because of the fair’s impeccable reputation in the art world, but also due to its well-respected relationships with established and emergent artists on the continent.”

Ayogu Kingsley I

More about the theme: An Endless Night

We fill up our time with tasks, purpose, duty and creating memories, in hopes of taking our subjective existence seriously with intrinsic value. This way, we create value by affirming time and living it, and not simply obsessing over its passing.

Time as a concept:

This theme is appropriately wide-ranging and encompasses ideas related to the past, present and future, including the ever-important concept of change that comes with the passing of time.

Curatorial Text:

Time is our scarcest resource. It is completely non-renewable. One thing humanity can all agree on is its intrinsic direction or order: past – present – future. How we experience time is not linear, because life is a subjective experience. What is similar is our desire to prolong ourexperience of time, and our attempt to find ourselves closer to a climactic moment in our narrative. We have a natural desire to extend the duration of anticipation, to linger and savour all the elements that go into the build-up of our lives, while acknowledging the detours and setbacks. It is this very experience that ties us together.

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet” – Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

This quotation demonstrates the fundamental part of human nature and our reluctance to accept the role we play in our demise/success and constructive/unconstructive use of time.

We are all given a set of tools to use, which we are tested by our belief system or lack thereof, to investigate our gifts, our lacks, our limits and understanding of the powerful finite territory of the present. The artists in this exhibition are encouraged to explore the passage of time that allows questions to unfold, characters to be drawn and findings to be resolved.