Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and former editor of frieze magazine who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit world and The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits. She is also the author of the novel Bedlam; author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; and editor of The Artist’s Joke. She has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize, the John Moore’s Painting Prize, and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission, the Contemporary Art Society and the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee. In 2023, Jennifer was guest curator of the exhibition of contemporary and historic painting, Thin Skin at Monash University Art Museum in Melbourne. Jennifer is also the host of the National Gallery of Australia’s new podcast, Artist’s Artists.

Penny Siopis was born in Vryburg, Northern Cape, South Africa. She currently lives and works in Cape Town.She has an MFA (1976) and an Honorary Doctorate (2017) from Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Siopis is currently an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She has lectured at the University of the Witwaterstrand and the Natal Technikon in Durban, South Africa, and has had research and teaching associations with the University at Leeds, UK and Umeå University in Sweden.

Siopis works in painting, film/video, photography and installation. In the past, her work critically engaged the genres of still life and history painting. Locating her practice within a post-colonial context the artist continues to reflect on the complex intersections of collective and individual history and the construction of memory. Her early interest in the feminist aesthetics has shaped her later explorations of violence, shame, sexuality and, more recently, grief. Conscious use of materiality as a signifier- both through out her media and in the embodied awareness of her own process – characterizes all Siopis’s work, whether in painting, found object installations or film.Concerned with what she calls “poetics of vulnerability” throughout her career, Siopis’s recent works pioneered glue and ink medium; they reflect on how accentuating painting process as human openness to non-human material, can be a model to think through larger power relations.

Working with white wood glue and multi-coloured inks, where their flows on her canvases are directed by gravity and the nature of the materials as much as by the artist’s own hand, she opens her process up not just for scrutiny but for deep engagement with the audience and with the political and social ecology of the world around her. Glue and ink works on exhibition are the result of artist’s Open Form/Open Studio residency at the Maitland Institute in Cape Town in 2017.Her work is in dialogue with material culture and the thematics of history, migration and memory. She has engaged the materiality of her media, be it slow drying paint or viscous glue that turns opaque, found film footage carrying snippets of people’s lives in its cracks or flea market finds with their traces of time flowing into the past.

Siopis has exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. She has taken part in biennales of Venice (2013 and 2003), Sydney (2010), Taipei (2016), Kwangju (1995), Havana (1997 and 1994), Guangzhou (1997) and Johannesburg (1997 and 1995). In 2014 and 2015 a major survey Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition by Penny Siopis, was presented at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town and Wits Art Museum. International solo exhibitions include Incarnations, Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Mauritius, Penny Siopis: Films, Erg Galerie, Brussels, Obscure White Messenger, Brandts Museum, Odense, Denmark and Three Essays on Shame, at the Freud Museum, London.

Tracey Rose (b. 1974, South Africa) is best known for her revolutionary performative practice, which often translates into photography, video, installation, and digital prints. Her work, described as absurd, anarchic, slapdash, and carnivalesque, explores themes such as post-coloniality, gender and sexuality, race, and repatriation.

Rose was born in Durban, South Africa, and began her artistic journey in 1990 at the Johannesburg Art Foundation before obtaining a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1996. In 2004, she attended The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance, later obtaining her Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2007. Rose currently resides and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Rose has exhibited widely, with significant shows at international venues, such as May You Live in Interesting Times (South African National Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale, 2016), Body Talk – Feminism, Sexuality & Body (49 Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine, Metz, France, 2016), False Flag (Art Parcours, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2016), and Toro Salvaje (Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2016). Other major exhibitions include (x) (Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain, 2014), Waiting for God (Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, 2011), Rose O'Grady (Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2011), Lubumbashi Biennial (Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2017), Performa 17 (New York, USA, 2017), and Documenta 14 (Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany, 2017). She has also participated in AfroModern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (Tate Liverpool, UK, 2010), and Africa Remix (The Haywood Gallery, London, UK and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2005), among many others.Rose’s Shooting Down Babylon mid-career retrospective was presented at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2022, with the exhibition continuing to tour, including to the Queens Museum, New York, from Zeitz MOCAA in 2023, and to the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2024.

Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathy, her work is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, and is questioning, complex and emotionally rich.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Royal Academy Wollaston Prize in 2006. Joffe has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2023–2024); The Modern, Fort Worth, Texas, USA (2022); Koohouse Museum, Yangpyong, Korea (2022); The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2021); The Foundling Museum, London, UK (2020); Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2020); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2018); The Lowry, Salford, UK (2018); Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2018, 2017); National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík (2016); National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2015); Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2015); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, UK (2015); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2014–2015); Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2013–2014); MODEM, Hungary (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2011); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, USA (2009); MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2007); Galleri KB, Oslo, Norway (2005) and Bloomberg Space, London, UK (2004).

Her work is in numerous institutional and private collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA; Detroit Institute of Arts, USA; National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.Joffe has created a major public work for the Elizabeth line in London titled A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel, on view at Whitechapel Elizabeth line station.

Cyril Coetzee is a portrait artist and has painted both informal and commissioned portraits throughout his career, including the portrait of Nelson Mandela, which was used for the international stamp commemorating Mandela's 90th birthday. He has served as a Fine Art lecturer at Port Elizabeth Technikon, as an Art History lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand and has been invited to give various lectures on Art History and on his own work in South Africa, England, Switzerland, the United States and Canada. His works are included in various public and private collections worldwide, including the Royal Ontario Museum, Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Standard Bank in London and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Sinazo Chiya is an associate director at Stevenson and the author of 9 More Weeks, a book of interviews with artists. She has contributed to the publications Adjective, Art Africa and ArtThrob, and is among the 2019 writing fellows at the Institute of Creative Arts, Universityof Cape Town. She was the editor of Uhambo luyazilawula, a monograph of Mawande Ka Zenzile’s work and her writing features in an upcoming publication by Penny Siopis, looking at the essay film. Most recently, she co-curated my whole body changed into something else, an exhibition taking place across Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, focusing broadly on ideas around existence and transformation.

Keely Shinners is a writer, editor and performer based in Cape Town. She has served as the Editor of ArtThrob and the Chairperson of the Association for Visual Arts. Her essays and art criticism can be found in several publications, including the Mail & Guardian and e-flux. She has also curated several group exhibitions, most recently, GIRLS TOO: TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH at Lemkus Gallery. She is also the author of the chapbook The Agonies and Ecstasies of Saint Marguerite (2025) and the novel How To Build a Home for the End of the World (2022).