Once a year, the iKhala (Eastern Cape Aloe) bursts through the province with its iconic orange flowers. The flowers arrive mid-winter, just when sunbirds and bees need their nectar, and the landscape craves their colour. Bold and resilient, the iKhala thrives in harsh weather conditions. It is sustenance, medicine, magic. Similarly, the National Arts Festival bursts into the town of Makhanda every winter too, with 2024 marking its fiftieth trip around the sun.

Given a history of this magnitude, this multidisciplinary exhibition resists the illusion of ‘wholeness’ by lifting out fragments from the archive – the visual artworks, performances, people, politics, and local phenomena that have shaped each decade of the Festival from 1974 to 2024. These pieces weave together a dialogue across half a century; bringing the viewer into the conversation and co-creation of Mattering. In this space, the Festival’s archive is made translucent and history is non-linear. It is the artworks, architecture, objects, elements, and our bodies themselves that constitute the Festival’s ever-evolving narrative. ‘If these walls could talk’ – they do here.

Like the beauty of the iKhala flower cannot exist without the bitterness of its leaves, remembering does not exist without forgetting, and a South African archive does not exist without its shadows. Gaps, blind spots, and violent erasures continue to haunt. Presence and absence, nature and culture, human and non-human, past and present, energy and matter; viewers are invited into a history of the Festival through its

entanglements, of which we are all a part.

*Live performance by Viwe Madinda & Siphosethu Balakisi on walkabout days:
Sunday 23 June 15h00
Friday 28 June 10h00
Saturday 29 June 16h00

Credits