Strange Cargo

A painful, beautiful, and incisive portrait of what was, what is, and what might come. Ashraf Jamal makes the tension between artistic practice, history, and society palpable in this series of searing essays, capturing the spirit and essence of the South African landscape of contemporary art.’ —Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA and Founding Director of RAW Material Company.
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. —Serubiri Moses, co-curator of the signature perennial survey Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2021)
Jamal’s detailed, passionate essays on art and exhibitions . . . are, in verve and insight, a masterclass in art criticism. It may be no revelation that South Africa is a cultural powerhouse, but this uniquely thought-provoking contribution to its scholarship crowns Jamal as one of the country’s leading intellectual firebrands. —Afonso Dias Ramos, Burlington Contemporary