WHOSE WATERS DO WE (GET TO) DRINK FROM?

Wine, water, corporate hospitality and the uncomfortable question of who actually gets to participate in contemporary African culture.

Motheo Mamabolo

10 September 2026

The FNB Art Fair is many things, depending on who you ask. The funniest “hot take” is that this is the best edition yet. I usually ask how many art fairs you’ve attended; the answer is too sad to mention here. But let’s take that opinion and run with it. The best one yet.

Let’s begin with access. A word that often gets thrown around because, in the Cupcakes economy, performance matters more than the actual gesture. Let’s define access first. In the simplest terms, access means the ability, right, or permission to enter, approach, or use something. Now that we’re on the same page, let’s start with the ticket price. R200. Two one-hundred-rand notes. That might not sound outrageous if you are a professional earning a comfortable salary, a collector, a corporate executive, an international visitor, or somebody who has already decided that spending a Saturday at an art fair is part of your leisure budget.

But South Africa is not made up exclusively of people with disposable income.

R200 is lunch, transport, data, groceries. A contribution towards the electricity bill. For some people, R200 is the difference between participating in a cultural experience or just sitting their asses at home. And this is where the language of access starts to feel rather fucking dishonest.

Of course, an art fair has costs. Of course, someone has to pay for the venue, security, infrastructure, staffing, insurance, logistics and everything else required to stage an event of this scale. But isn’t that what FNB and BMW are there for? Or am I confused? What is their purpose here?

Yes, this is my public declaration that art fairs should be free. If we can get BMW to sponsor the cars, surely someone can convince the ‘broers’ that entrance should be free. But that would be asking way too much from Mandla Sibeko. Why make it free when he can milk us all of our last money? And this is where I think Mandla Sibeko needs to get a little uncomfortable. Context is everything. If the ambition is genuinely to locate, support and platform the most interesting contemporary art being made across the continent and beyond, then you cannot keep fishing in the same pond and congratulate yourself for discovering water. Go to Lubumbashi. Go to Bamako. Go to Kalba. Go to Belo Horizonte. Go somewhere where the itinerary is not already mapped out by the same galleries, curators, consultants and five-star hotel lobbies. Roll up your sleeves. Miss a flight. Sit in somebody’s studio without air-conditioning. Find the artist whose work has not already been softened into a PDF by a communications department. Because if the same names, the same cities and the same cultural middlemen keep circulating through the programme, then what exactly are we calling access? Access for whom? At some point the comfort zone starts masquerading as curatorial strategy. That is not accessibility. It is violent complacency. 

The funny thing is how accessibility becomes some sick joke. I mean, Goodman Gallery invites guests to a free event, but not free-free, because entry still costs money. You can’t make this shit up. If we are going to repeatedly frame these spaces as platforms for community, education, access and African creativity, then we need to interrogate what access actually means. Access isn’t just being allowed through the door. Access is being able to afford the door.

The thing about the South African art world is that everybody knows everybody. Everybody has worked for somebody, fallen out with somebody, owes somebody money, wants somebody’s job, or is pretending not to care about somebody else’s success.

And then, once a year, we all gather at the FNB Art Fair and pretend this is a serious industry. There are champagne glasses. There are panel discussions.

Collectors walk around with the facial expressions of people who have just discovered conceptual art. Artists pretend they aren’t checking who is looking at their work. Gallerists pretend everything is going wonderfully. And there are the rest of us. Watching.

Because if there is one thing the FNB Art Fair has consistently managed to produce, it isn’t necessarily discourse.

It is a spectacle.

And what in the world is BMW Art Generation anyway? And who approved this ticket price? R500 to participate in a cultural programme. And then we have the nerve to talk about “cultural capital”???  Oh, and the exhibition title is what really tickles me. Whose Waters Do We Drink From? The exhibition title seems to ask us to think about lineage, influence, resource and inheritance. Standing inside an art fair sponsored by some of the biggest corporate institutions in the country, surrounded by branded experiences and bottles of expensive wine, the question suddenly feels less metaphorical than perhaps intended.

Whose waters do we drink from? Not even a bottle of water in sight. This question feels absurd. Entering a supposedly sophisticated cultural environment and encountering water that, in Cupcakes economy, is either unavailable or reportedly has concerning levels of chlorine – while the place is overflowing with wine. Wine everywhere. White, red, sparkling. Wine for everyone, wine for the people standing around discussing “the future of Africa” while holding a glass of something that probably costs more than the ticket itself.

Call me petty. But sometimes petty is political analysis wearing a crop top. Water is not an abstract concept in this country. Water is infrastructure, dignity, access. Water is survival. So when Kim Kandan asks that question, while the material experience of the fair appears to be one where actual water is somehow less abundant than alcohol, I cannot help but laugh. Because from where I am standing, we seem to be drinking from the same old corporate tap and the wine is overflowing. But not for everyone.

This is not an argument against wine; I understand how hospitality works. There is just something grotesque about the optics of a cultural event that is simultaneously asking audiences to engage with serious questions about resources, inheritance and African futures while creating an environment in which corporate hospitality appears infinitely more abundant than basic public accessibility.

Maybe that’s the point.  Maybe Whose Waters Do We Drink From? is less a question than a confession. Because the answer to it is clear to me: whoever the hell is paying!

Which brings us neatly back to BMW. I am still asking, who the hell decided that we should care about what an automotive company has to say about contemporary art? Why is this multinational company so deeply involved in shaping it? When a corporation attaches itself to contemporary African art, it doesn’t merely buy advertising space. It buys proximity to culture. It buys association with innovation. It buys cultural relevance. It buys a certain kind of legitimacy.

And that panel? So we are just letting anyone on there? Okay. I mean, why stop there? Why not invite the guy who installed the lighting? The people selling wine? The Uber driver who dropped everyone off at the Sandton Convention Centre? At least then we might get a fresh perspective.

This is another thing that fascinates me about the art world: how quickly proximity becomes authority. Be seen in the right room. Show at the right gallery. Get invited to the right panel. Have your name printed in the programme. Suddenly you are not simply participating in the art world. You are speaking for it.

If a corporation can attach its name to African creativity, surely we should be allowed to ask whether it has earned the authority to help define what that creativity looks like. And this is where the questions around Kelebogile Marope become interesting.

Not because of nationality, or where she even comes from. Not because of some ridiculous anxiety about who is or isn’t African. The question is about the work. Now we know about the striking similarities between Marope and Seerjarim. We also know FNB Art Joburg isn’t backing down, and that the Sowetan article is all the proof we need. “Marope’s work predates Seerjarim.” That’s the logic? What is increasingly frustrating about the FNB Art Prize is the lack of context around Marope’s work and career. Painted in powder blue, there was not a single write-up in sight in the booth. The context was for you, the audience, to decide.

So before anyone begins barking at me about xenophobia, let us all calm down. Artists borrow, we know. They reference; they have dialogue. The question for me isn’t even about plagiarism at this point, but is the work even original? Is it innovative? The short answer is no. The proof? Well, what’s more telling than the copyright allegations?

We know about the found object in art. Its history in the art world goes back to the early 1900s, when presenting something as ordinary as newspaper clippings as art was, frankly, unfathomable. I think about Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, where he began asking an interesting question: why can’t real objects be considered art? Then came artists like Duchamp, who took that question and really fucking ran with it.

This is why I love the movement. It flips our understanding of what constitutes “real art” on its head. It changes the way we look at materials. Suddenly, anything can become artistic. But that doesn’t mean we’ll automatically be convinced when you put an iron on a plinth and call it art. Context is everything.

An iron sitting in a laundry room is a tool. Put that same iron inside a white cube and suddenly its function, symbolism and relationship to the viewer change. The object hasn’t necessarily changed, but the context around it has. And we already know the iron as a visual language within contemporary art. Willie Cole, for example, has extensively used discarded steam irons as a material, drawing on an object that is familiar and domestic, something found in countless homes. Decades earlier, Man Ray (born Emanuel Radnitzky) presented his flat iron sculpture The Gift at his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1921.

So the argument that Marope’s work somehow predates Seejarim’s work, therefore making the similarities irrelevant, doesn’t really hold water for me. Artists have explored this for decades: what happens when an everyday domestic object is removed from its ordinary function and placed into an artistic context. They aren’t exactly difficult to find.

And that, for me, is where the conversation becomes more interesting than simply asking “Who did it first?”. The question should be: what are you doing with it now?

My own critical position is that the similarities raise serious questions about originality and artistic innovation. And if copyright allegations are in circulation, they deserve scrutiny rather than dismissal or weaponisation. But for me, this moment is actually less interesting as a scandal than it is as a question about the FNB Art Prize itself.

Because watch as Marope’s career becomes a prompt for collectors. “Buy her now”. Forget the allegations, forget the discourse and the questions it brings. This is who we need to be looking at; that is all that matters. Perhaps that is what it means to be the winner. It is about being chosen, and shit, who doesn’t want to be chosen? Because this is how the market works. An artist is selected. The institution confers legitimacy. The press follows. The collectors arrive. The galleries adjust the narrative. Suddenly the work is not simply work anymore. It is an opportunity. It is a moment. A name to watch, an investment. A career with momentum.

Let’s be clear: the FNB Art Prize has real star power. Look at its history. Cedric Nunn. Kudzanai Chiurai. Turiya Magadlela. Portia Zvavahera. Nolan Oswald Dennis. Haroon Gunn-Salie. Bronwyn Katz. Lady Skollie. Dada Khanyisa. Lindokuhle Sobekwa. The prize has become infrastructure. Infrastructure has power. It can create careers. It can influence what collectors buy and what younger artists think they need to become to be seen.

So this year’s question shouldn’t simply be whether Marope deserved to win.

It should perhaps be: What does the FNB Art Prize want us to believe about contemporary African art right now?

And then I look around at the rest of the industry and realise this isn’t even unique to FNB. Why are car companies suddenly everywhere? BMW is embedded in FNB Art Joburg through the BMW Collectors Co. and BMW Art Generation, which the fair itself describes as part of its audience and collector-development infrastructure. And then there’s Lexus giving out awards for Best Stand at RMB Latitudes for a good three years running now, literally giving out an accolade for the best presentation; I have to ask, why? Why are luxury car brands increasingly becoming arbiters of taste in the art world? Why must the language of luxury become the language of cultural value? And why are we so comfortable with this?

I want to be clear: I don’t have a problem with these brands’ presence in the art world. Hell, we need all the money we can get right now. I mean, we barely have a Minister. Besides, corporate money has always been part of cultural production. The problem I have is when funding quietly becomes the authority. When sponsors not only decide to fund the room but they actively start deciding what happens inside it, when prizes begin to define artistic success.

That may be the pivot, the future of African Art here in South Africa. But we should be careful to further grow the island that we are becoming. Culture is hospitality. Prizes have luxury logos and conversations have corporate sponsors and the larger public can’t buy food or water with this. Maybe the access to water will be challenging for as long as the wine is flowing. But if we are going to drink these corporate waters, then I would at least like to know who is pouring.