The Infecting the City 2015 public arts festival runs from Monday 9 to Saturday 14 March and the programme is live on the Festival’s website. For a word version, please click here
The 2015 Festival sees a new curatorial format with a team of curators presenting a programme of works each. Each group on the programme (lettered A-E) is loosely clustered around an idea or theme.
The curatorial team members were chosen for their different backgrounds and disciplines and have diverse ideas about how art functions in public space – and around how audiences interact with public art.
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- Infecting the City
In a series of works grouped under the idea, “Ways of Belonging”; curator Nadia Daehnke and curatorial assistant Ryno Keet explore the tensions between anonymity and belonging in the context of a city.
Mandla Mbothwe, and curatorial intern Mandisi Sindo’s, theme is “Crossing Over and Round About”, which looks at their group of works through the lens of an ongoing interaction between people and architecture; exploring how humanity shapes and gives meaning to public spaces.
Farzanah Badsha’s programme “What We Deserve” tells multiple stories about how we define and use public space and asks what legacy we are leaving behind to mark our passage and our contributions.
The curatorial team is working under the leadership of Jay Pather, who has curated four previous iterations of Infecting the City.
On 9 February 2015, Infecting the City won an award for the Best Contribution to Visual Arts, including Public Arts, at the Western Cape Government Cultural Affairs Awards.
Infecting the City is a project of the Africa Centre. All items on both the day time and night time programmes are free.
Three major sponsors have partnered with Infecting the City this year: the National Department of Arts & Culture, founding sponsor Spier and the City of Cape Town.
Additional sponsors include: Santam, Pro Helvetia, Western Cape Government and the Goethe Institute. For the first time, Infecting the City partnered with crowdfunding platform, Thundafund, to diversify the works included in the Festival by selecting ten works that called for public funding.
