The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre(VIAD), University of Johannesburg, are excited to announce the Johannesburg book launch of Ashraf Jamal's latest book,
STRANGE CARGO : Essay's on Art (2022)

Strange Cargo: Essays on Art is a collection of forty essays by Ashraf Jamal, written between 2019 and 2021, and set to be published by Skira this December. It can be regarded as the twin of Jamal’s previous book, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017), which Afonso Dias Ramos described in the Burlington Contemporary as ‘unlike any publication on the topic . . . a masterclass in arts criticism.’ Comprising forty-essays, Strange Cargo is no different. Both form part of a single venture to celebrate and entrench the rich complexity of South African artists in a global imaginary. The artists that Jamal chooses to reflect upon refuse to fit into a predictive algorithm. He has written with equal intensity about artists old and young, dead or alive, famous or relatively unknown, black or white, trending or not. Love and empathy—his indifference to difference—is his engine room, and much like the artists featured, Jamal does not only write for the moment we are in, but for a readership to come. In his synopsis of Strange Cargo, Serubiri Moses, co-curator of the signature perennial survey Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2021), writes:

‘A key to Ashraf Jamal’s writing is his prose, the bricks and mortar of his criticism and theory of art. Jamal pushes and pulls, laying bare the underlying tensions of his country of birth, South Africa, through bright contradiction … He offers a sensorium, forcing us to confront the ‘pathological’ and what it means to be human, to exist as beings that think and feel. Rather than being instructive, the aim is for readers to come to consciousness on their own terms, through a potent psychology and a generative doubt.’

Similarly, writer and editor Alexandra Dodd writes:

‘Unafraid to provoke the ire of the demigods of currency or cancellation, Ashraf Jamal comes to the artwork with his whole self, as if life depended on it—which, for many of us, it does. His writing asserts the adrenalising power of the art object. From a position of radical unfixity, he moves his dowsing stick across the surfaces of South African contemporary culture to divine the groundwater from the toxic slimes-dams of what he