Chris Thurman

South Africa

Teaches literature @WitsUniversity. Arts columnist @BDLiveSA. Writes. Rants. Runs. Shakespeare stuff: @Tsikinya_Chaka and @shakespeare_za

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Articles

CHRIS THURMAN: Scars of life both hidden and on display

1 day ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

If you’re a character in a Paul Slabolepszy play, the chances are you’re misunderstood. You might seem like a recognisable SA “type” — maybe even a caricature. Yet as the play unfolds, you reveal hidden depths, both to your fellow characters and to the audience.
CHRIS THURMAN: Once seen as kitsch, Tretchikoff painting breaks record

1 week ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

I was fortunate to grow up in a house full of artwork. My grandfather, an eager sketcher since his days as an Allied soldier captured by the Germans during World War 2, took up painting in his retirement, producing a series of landscapes and still life studies, in watercolours and oils, that adorned our walls. They are well executed, but of course technical accomplishment is not what matters here.
CHRIS THURMAN: Thinking about writing and writing about thinking

2 weeks ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

I’m a writer. I write for money. I write for pleasure (not including emails). Writing gives me a challenge, a sense of meaning, a purpose. Part of my job, until recently, was teaching people how to write — or how to think by writing. This also meant teaching people how to read properly. For a decade or two, another unpleasant sub-activity of my day job as a university professor was figuring out whether my students had actually written what they presented as their writing.
CHRIS THURMAN: Artists take malleable play texts and make them revelatory

3 weeks ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

Henrik Ibsen is widely regarded as the first “modern” playwright. His experimentation with form and style — ranging from grim realism to surreal fantasia and psychological melodrama — was matched by his boldness in treating subject matter that was widely considered taboo. Ibsen’s characters reject broken marriages and stifling social conventions, seeking to free themselves from the constraints of bourgeois propriety.
CHRIS THURMAN: Seeing art literally with new eyes

3 weeks ago | wantedonline.co.za | Chris Thurman

Nelson Makamo’s Untitled 2024 screenprint on archival paper Last week I caught snippets of a talk radio discussion in which listeners were invited to suggest changes they’d like to see made to our constitution.
CHRIS THURMAN: Seeing art literally with new eyes

4 weeks ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

Earlier this week I caught snippets of a talk radio discussion in which listeners were invited to suggest changes they’d like to see made to our constitution.
CHRIS THURMAN: Alan Committie is a whodunnit pro as Poirot in Black Coffee

1 month ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

This issue of Supply Chain Management explores the implications of Amazon’s SA expansion for stakeholders
CHRIS THURMAN: Installations pit balance against imbalance

1 month ago | wantedonline.co.za | Chris Thurman

From Salim Currimjee’s Tula exhibition Stevenson’s premises in the leafy suburb of Parktown North make for a welcome respite from the business of the city: the gallery is situated in a fine old Johannesburg residence, all pressed ceilings and wraparound verandas.
CHRIS THURMAN: Installations pit balance against imbalance

1 month ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

Stevenson’s premises in the leafy suburb of Parktown North make for a welcome respite from the business of the city: the gallery is situated in a fine old Johannesburg residence, all pressed ceilings and wraparound verandas. On my most recent visit, the building’s sedate white exterior was playfully offset by a handful of colourful struts and arches — not architectural embellishments, but a continuation of the lines shooting across the rooms and through the walls of the gallery.
CHRIS THURMAN: ‘The Fall’ reminds SA of 2015’s Fallist movement a decade on

1 month ago | businesslive.co.za | Chris Thurman

The new production of The Fall at the Market Theatre takes place on a stage marked by a large red hashtag. All around it, scored in neat rows across the floor and the backdrop, are dozens of smaller hashtags. If you know anything about SA universities circa 2015-2016, you know what the icons signify: #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall. Ten years on, these social media throwbacks may seem rather quaint.