The vernissage saw a crowd of around 5,000 attendees which included largely local collectors taking an early look at 400 works mainly by African artists and artists its diasporas. Key local market heavyweights like Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, and Southern Guild, which will open a Los Angeles outpost later this month, showed alongside Kenya’s Circle Art, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury from Côte d’Ivoire, A.Gorgi from Tunisia, Botswana-based Ora Loapi, and Borna Soglo Gallery from Benin. Several  Italian exhibitors, such as Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Galleria Anna Marra and Shazar Gallery, were also on hand, likely due to the fair’s Milanese owner company, Fiera Milano.

Laura Vincenti, the fair’s director, described the last decade as “a learning curve.” In that time, she has focused on bringing “galleries with content that communicates with the local scene,” she told ARTnews. “I have learned that not all galleries are prepared to show in Cape Town.”

In addition to the main gallery section, Investec also includes eight curated sections like Generations, which is new to the fair this year. (Exhibitors can participate in multiple sections.) Organized by Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu, Generations pairs young artists with established names to show parallels between artists’ work across decades. Johannesburg-based painter Boemo Diale, who exhibited with South African gallery Kalashnikovv Gallery, received the section’s cash prize of $80,000 South African Rand (around $4,200).

“The goal is to create fresh perspective on historical figures through the lens of contemporary artists who are in dialogue with the past,” Becker told ARTnews.

One example is placing SMAC Gallery’s presentation of Bonolo Kavula’s ephemeral geometric cutouts of shweshwe cloth adjacent to the Melrose Gallery’s booth dedicated to color-bursting paintings and sculptures by Esther Mahlangu, the grand dame of South Africa’s art scene, whose career survey at the Iziko South African National Gallery also opened this week.

Nearby, the vibrantly corporal paintings by Terence Maluleke at the Southern Guild’s booth flirt with Riaan Bolt Antiques’s group presentation dedicated to early Apartheid-era tapestry and pottery which has largely remained in European collections. Southern Guild sold all seven of Maluleke paintings which range between $5,000 and $8,600 before the end of the VIP day. “The response was extremely positive,” said Southern Guild director Jana Terblanche of the gallery’s multiple presentations at the fair, which also sold four Kamyar Bineshtarigh paintings for around $20,000 each and a timber-and-acrylic sculpture by Dominique Zinkpè for $24,000. 

In the main section, Goodman Gallery exhibited a selection of roster artists including international powerhouses like William Kentridge and Yinka Shonibare alongside Kudzanai Chiurai and Gabrielle Goliath, who will both feature in this year’s Venice Biennale. On par with the gallery’s intergenerational presentation, prices for works sold on the first day ranged broadly from $12,000 to $275,000.

Goodman is also showing in a section of the fair called “Tomorrows/Today,” which speculates on “tomorrow’s leading names,” per the fair’s description. The gallery introduces the subtly documentarian photographs of Lindokuhle Sobekwa ahead of his first institutional show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this September.

“Sobekwa’s imagery has a delicate yet powerful quality that draws viewers into the stories he articulates. He is definitely an artist we are excited to support,” said Olivia Leahy, Goodman Gallery’s head of curatorial.

Stevenson, another established South African gallery, had in its booth a kitchen photograph by South African Pieter Hugo; a nocturnal-hued, large-scale abstraction, titled The Abundance of life (2023), by New Zealand–based Nigerian painter Ruth Iga; and Penny Siopis’s Mercy (2007), a striking drawing of a figure that leaps out of the frame into a plastic chain to spell the work’s title.

The scene-stealer in WHATIFTHEWORLD’s grouping was Chris Soal’s intricately built toothpick and concrete sculpture, Inferno, which sold for $17,100. Pierre Vermeulen’s mixed-media linen painting of faux gold leaf and sweat, Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, found a collector for $13,400.

Another standout at the fair comes in the Solo section, where EBONY/CURATED has a presentation dedicated to local painter Anico Mostert, who makes dreamlike oil on canvases with powdery hues. His 2023 work, From View to View, sold for $4,200 on the first day. 

One of the fair’s section with the abundant promise of discovery is ALT, which provides a platform for nontraditional commercial formats, such as curatorial collectives, nomadic spaces, advisory services, and online galleries. South African curator and adviser Anelisa Mangcu’s four-year-old initiative Under the Aegis builds a corporal tie between Dutch-Ghanaian photographer Casper Kofi’s dramatically lit images of landscapes and men, alongside Buqaqawuli Thamani Nobakada’s female protagonists painted with acrylic on lace and paper.

Church Projects’s gold-painted booth drew visitors to Durban-based photographer Alka Dass’s moody prints of men that she adorns with gentle punches of red thread and beads. Borna Soglo Gallery displayed London-based artist Tamibé Bourdanné’s photographs of Bubu Ogisi performing in Benin for a personal exploration of African masquerades that are accompanied by the plush toys donned by Ogisi in the booth’s corner.

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair continues into the weekend, with stand-out programming like a two performances by Cape Town–based artist Thania Petersen at the Bo Kaap Museum on Saturday evening, accompanied by jazz musician Hilton Schilder, Afrikaaps rapper, poet Jitsvinger, and a handful of dancers.

Opening at the tail end of a year defined by doubt and unrest, the group exhibition “World Peace” at MoCA Westport in Connecticut—co-curated by Ruth Mannes, Liz Leggett, and Todd von Ammon—took on this widely coveted, yet almost meaninglessly abstract concept. Despite the internationalism implied by the titular phrase, the show’s intergenerational roster primarily featured artists based in the US, with the works on view foregrounding an American outlook on political strife and human struggle.

Greeting viewers at the exhibition’s entrance was Tabor Robak’s MiniJumbo (2019), a scaled-down version of a stadium jumbotron screen. In place of sports game highlights, slogans like “New Addictive Substance” and “Work Harder” slide and pop across the screens in flashy fonts, the texts algorithmically generated by a neural network trained on contemporary advertising. This critique of capitalist rhetoric was accompanied by an array of works addressing militarism and war. Corita Kent’s screen-printed collage News of the Week (1969) presents a Pop-inflected take on the mass media representation of the Vietnam War, reproducing two covers from the same week’s issues of Newsweek and Time magazines in a glaring palette of red and green. Similarly employing appropriated imagery, Julia Wachtel’s painting Target (2017) juxtaposes a silkscreen print of an armed member of a Texan militia, patrolling the border in a menacing mask, with a painting of a cartoonish a balding middle-age man contemplating a toupee and girdle, drawn from a vintage greeting card. Robert Beck’s unexpectedly seductive Wound Filler (Shot #6), 2000, takes the form of a mysterious orifice, created by shooting a hole into a mass of wound filler, commonly used by morticians.

Julia Wachtel, Target, 2017, oil and acrylic ink on canvas, 60 by 76 inches; at MoCA Westport.

The exhibition’s larger second gallery was dominated by another text-based work, this one calling for action. A massive banner by the New Haven-based activist graphic design collective Class Action Collective, Vote for Science (2018) was suspended from the ceiling, dramatically spilling across the floor. The repurposed banner, reading HOPE FOR THE BEST, VOTE FOR SCIENCE in bold red and blue lettering, is one of many that the group installed on highway billboards across Connecticut, Florida, and Indiana during the 2018 midterm elections, in collaboration with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Some of the surrounding works conveyed humanity’s abominations, among them Cady Noland’s Untitled (Charles Manson), 1994, a collage of Xeroxed newspapers showing the notorious serial killer handcuffed during his trial. Others hinted at the cyclical nature of violence and injustice: the exhibition’s oldest work, a simple line drawing of a lynching on found cardboard by Bill Traylor—one of over 1,500 drawings the self-taught, Alabama-based artist made between 1939 and 1942—hung steps away from a documentary photograph by Spencer Platt depicting the arrest of a protestor in Portland during last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings (Female Protestor, 2020).

When I visited the show, Mannes told me that the title was inspired by a 1996 video installation by Bruce Nauman, in which five figures—one per screen—talk over one another, exchanging pleasantries (“I’ll talk, you listen” and vice versa) that ultimately turn aggressive (“If you say it once more, I’ll kill you.”). The exhibition reflected a similar skepticism about the idea of “world peace,” with the works on view highlighting atrocities, inequalities, and social fractures that can’t be simply wished away.