Archives, algorithms, and attention: NAF 2026
Shows on the Main (now called the Curated Programme) looked searchingly at the unfinished past and anxiously towards the digital future. Across the programme, one question lingered: where do we direct our attention, and what do we leave out?”
Festival supporters from around the country, some even daring to leave the high-heeled couture-laden arts spaces of Joburg and Cape Town, made the annual pilgrimage to the small, pothole-and-donkey-filled Eastern Cape town of Makhanda to soak up this year’s National Arts Festival offerings. What they found was an eclectic, deeply reflective festival programme grappling with the past, uneasy about the future, and more tentative in its engagement with the material and political conditions of the present.
Across theatre, film, performance and visual art, artists returned to lost objects, fractured memory, inherited trauma, and knowledge that has survived outside the formal archive, while artificial intelligence, algorithms and online spectacle offered a more anxious language for imagining the future. Running through these disparate concerns was a recurring question about the place of art itself: what it can recover, whom it can reach, what pressures shape it, and whether it can still command our attention in a world increasingly indifferent to it.
Among the most provocative and innovative works was Dear Museum! The Truth of the Matter, a theatre and performance art piece about archival justice, the return of cultural objects, and the caricatural representation of cultures and peoples in classic ethnographic practice. “Your truth has not left much space for mine,” said Albert Ibokwe Khoza in a love letter addressed to European museums.
The performance flips the colonial gaze onto the audience, turning them into the objects of curatorial display: in all their discomfort, shame, and obedience, which Khoza cleverly uses. The performance opened up difficult questions about what white South Africans, Europeans, and other beneficiaries of colonial and apartheid histories owe in restitution, redistribution, recognition and repair. At times, however, it seemed to substitute the production of shame, and the threat of punishment, for the work of justice and healing itself.
Elsewhere, the past was approached more obliquely. Market Theatre’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela did not shy away from the moral complexity of its protagonists: women whose lives were shaped by waiting, struggle, and the weight and consequences of their choices made under circumstances beyond their control. The show did not attempt to resolve the contradictions of Winnie Mandela’s life. Instead, it did what many productions struggled to do: invited viewers in, gave them a seat and an experience, and trusted them to reach their own imperfect conclusions.
Jason Jacobs’s Kraal created an ethereal world in which the protagonist summons figures from his ancestral past, while memories are projected onto soft cloth, and the legacies of the colonial dop system are surfaced with care against the backdrop of the sacred, arid Kamiesberg mountains. The quiet of these ancient hills and stone formations also provides the landscape for Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s film, Variations on a Theme: A quietly devastating slice-of-life film centred on 80-year-old Ouma Hettie. Each morning, she opens the gate of her kraal to let her goats out to roam, then peers out into the distance as she waits for historical compensation that never arrives.
In these works, waiting begins as a political condition: waiting for justice, compensation, return, or the promises of democracy to materialise. But it also becomes a question of how to live when those things may never come. In this sense, waiting speaks not only to the unfinished condition of post-apartheid South Africa but also to the more intimate question of what choices remain possible and what responsibility we bear for our lives in the present.
These themes of inheritance, recovery and active reworking extended beyond the stage. Bronwyn Katz’s installation approached recovery not as the restoration of something intact, but as an act of imaginative reconstruction. It explores the retrieval of lost language as a living conversation: between body, sound, space, land, and material. Seashells, medicinal herbs, soil, sand and body-maps transmit fragments of history and knowledge into the present in an altered form. This movement between archival fragments and living sound continued in the MTN x UJ New Contemporaries Award Exhibition, where two intricate works reassembled archival material in homage to the oral and musical histories of Africa and its diaspora.
The programme paid careful attention to local cultural difference, historical particularity, and the recovery of what has been erased. Yet that felt curiously detached from a moment in which difference was being weaponised on South Africa’s streets, amid a significant recent wave of xenophobic mobilisation. More broadly, the material and political crises of the present remained comparatively faint.
One of the festival’s most compelling encounters across cultural difference was I Have a Story that Seems Like Mine, a multidisciplinary performance installation by Brazilian artist Tetembua Dandara. Strangers from diverse backgrounds are immersed in a warmly lit, cosy domestic setting, offered homemade food, the sounds of Brazilian music, and the intricate stories of Dandara’s family history. The ‘us versus them’ dynamic marking much of contemporary politics is broken here not by a calling out, but a calling in.
Questions about institutional power and artistic freedom surfaced more directly in the Gabrielle Goliath People’s Tribunal, which unpacked the right to dissent in a climate where institutions and social pressures mould what can and cannot be said. “Art will defend democracy,” one participant declared.
Divisive politics, much of it amplified online, and questions about who or what shapes artistic expression, resurfaced in the festival’s engagement with algorithms, artificial intelligence and digital life. The Canadian performance art and theatre production, 2021, used futuristic AI tools to revisit a deeply personal history: the director’s attempt to come to terms with her father’s death, his life, and what it means for the digital to represent the human. There was something deeply empathetic about stepping into the shoes of an elderly MAGA supporter as he navigates his days among hospital wings, having to confront a human fragility he has spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
The absurdity of being ‘chronically online’, artists having to compete in the attention economy, and what this reveals about our (in)human condition under late-stage capitalism is sharply captured in Louise Orwin’s absurdist performance art show FAMEHUNGRY. “I wondered how lonely you had to be to watch a woman eat a lollipop for 45 minutes,” she says dryly. After repeatedly splashing herself with a cup of water, which looks sexy on screen but quite ridiculous from the audience’s perspective, she calls a TikTok influencer watching her livestream and asks, “Do you ever think about what you contribute to society?” He answers: “I make people smile.” This exchange exposed the narrow terms on which cultural value is increasingly measured: visibility, engagement and immediate pleasure, rather than art’s more difficult capacity to unsettle, provoke, and demand sustained attention. It was a gruelling interrogation of where people choose to direct their attention as the arts and culture sector crumbles and the world burns.
That exchange lingered. Across a festival preoccupied with memory, inheritance, technology and loss, it left behind a deceptively simple question: what do we choose to look at, and what do we allow to remain outside the frame?
Photo caption: British performer Louise Orwin in FAMEHUNGRY at the National Arts Festival, photographed by Mark Wessels