Africa’s No 1 Arts Bookstore and Publisher

Spier Contemporary opened at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on Saturday 15 March. The show was housed in a series of shipping containers at the Spier wine estate in Stellenbosch but now fills the spacious rooms of the JAG. Those fortunate enough to have seen the show in Cape Town should not miss its Joburg run: the change in environment affords some interesting observations on the relationship between art and its spatial context.

Many who attended the launch were pleased to discover that our bookstore was up and running and had plenty of copies of the Spier Contemporary catalogue for sale at R200, as well as a good selection of other titles on South African and international art. The show remains at the JAG through April and our bookstore will be open during the gallery’s normal running hours, including 10 to 5 on Sundays (closed Mondays).

More on Spier Contemporary

Africa enters the 21st century without a major international museum, research institute or performance venue dedicated to the arts, culture and heritage of the continent. The Africa Centre seeks to address these glaring needs. Based in South Africa, the Africa Centre is both a physical entity and an ongoing philosophical process. It is meant to grow spatially and conceptually over a period of several years, in time it will emerge as a multi-sited, multiple-usage space where the visual, intellectual and performance cultures of Africa, South and North are celebrated, studied and brought to life for diverse audiences in innovative ways.

One of the Africa Centre’s new initiatives is the Spier Contemporary. Named after its primary sponsor - Spier - the Spier Contemporary is a major South African exhibition and awards which opened on 12 December 2007. Spier Contemporary is a biennial event that began at the Spier State.

This choice has come from a belief that arts and culture give us an understanding of the complexities of our society in a way that political and other discourses are not able to provide. In a society as rapidly changing as ours we need many ways of ‘knowing ourselves’. One of the themes that have emerged in the last few years in South African art and life is the difficulty of speaking about certain subjects. As ideas of political, cultural, social, moral and other norms have changed or been challenged, there have not always been the vocabularies to cope with these changes.

Keywords: Art, Bookstore, Catalogue, JAG, Jay Pather, Performance-Art, South-African, Spier Contemporary 2007