FREE ARTIST TALKS 003: Cape Town

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a London-based multidisciplinary artist who explores humanity’s complex ties to nature and technology amid environmental crises. Her works like Resurrecting the Sublime and Pollinator Pathmaker use AI, synthetic biology, and living gardens to simulate extinct species or insect-friendly ecosystems, questioning innovation versus conservation. She critiques anthropocentrism through non-human perspectives, such as rewilding Mars or algorithmically designed pollinator habitats with 7,000 plants, urging empathy and behavioural change. Blending beauty, anxiety, and sublime aesthetics, Ginsberg challenges art’s role in ecological repair and carbon-positive creation.

Lebohang Kganye is an artist from Johannesburg, who reimagines photography through intimate family archives, blending personal loss—after her mother’s death—with South African apartheid histories. In series like Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story, she recreates ancestral snapshots by dressing in heirloom clothes, posing identically, then digitally fusing herself into the images, blurring past and present. Her practice extends to installations featuring life-size cutouts and collages, transforming static photos into performative storytelling that probes memory, identity, home, and oral traditions as living archives.

Nadine Cloete & Claudia Snyman collaborate together in The Last Speaker (2022). A documentary directed by Cloete, which follows language researcher Claudia Snyman, an educator and granddaughter of Queen Ouma Katrina Esau, the last fluent speaker of N|uu, a 25,000-year old endangered San click-language from South Africa’s Kalahari. Snyman and Esau are collaborating to compile the first N|uu Dictionary, preserving words, songs, and stories suppressed during colonial oppression. The film captures their emotional journey, reviving Bushman heritage amid cultural extinction. N|uu, once spoken by thousands, dwindles to Esau alone. Their work fosters pride in indigenous identity, blending oral traditions with modern archiving for future generations.