LISTERS | New art gallery goes the whole Nine Yards

Winter decided to offer Joburg a taste of what lies around the corner as I made my way to a place that’s a hangout for hipsters (remember them?) who have grown up and now hold down nine-to-fives when not playing padel.

This was Thursday night, and, as the temperature hovered around 8°C, guests in buttoned-up coats walked briskly through Nine Yards in Parktown North and up a path towards a structure featuring a floor-to-ceiling-windowed room spliced into the shell of a former suburban house, with a white illuminated box floating on its roof.

This sentinel in the recently completed upper side of the green lung precinct is the home of kumalo | turpin, a new contemporary art space self-described as “dedicated to exhibiting the next generation of leading artists from the global majority”.

The gallery opened its doors with an exhibition titled “gender/genre”, featuring works spanning sculpture, painting and photography from a roster of women artists.

Entering, I find gallerists Zanele Kumalo and MJ Turpin in a room that formed part of the original building. (In case you didn’t know, the name of the precinct comes from the nine houses renowned landscape designer Keith Kirsten bought up after opening the original nursery that forms part of the hub).

How did the gallery come about?

“It’s been a few years in the making. It is born out of …” starts Zanele, who was wearing a giant sculptural metal brooch by Ivka Čiča on her cream-coloured coat, before turning to her co-founder.

“… a relationship we shared for connecting and a love of the arts,“ adds MJ, who many in the art world first came to know as the co-director of the Kalashnikovv Gallery, which last year shuttered its physical space in Braam after 12 years. “Over time, Zan grew from a collector into a curator, and the natural evolution was to manifest that in the form of a gallery.”

As Masi Losi moves in to take a pic of the duo, his back foot lands a little too close for comfort near the red soil forming part of a work by Eva Lundon, but luckily artist and curator Stephen Hobbs — who is responsible for the enthralling metal trees which dot Juta Street in Braamfontein — notices, helping to avoid a potential art calamity.

Fortunately, in the new extension most of the art hangs from the walls, and that is where I find myself longingly gazing at what looks like a warm comforter but turns out to be an artwork by Thulile Gamedze titled Vagal Outflow, which is crafted from “archived afterlife fabrics, tension mechanisms, ink, batting, thread, polyfill, webbing, washers and rope”.

“I have a consciousness of all the bodies that touched the material, so when I get to naming [my artworks], it always seems to come back to references to the body,” explains the artist. The work references the parasympathetic nervous system.

Sadly, there was no comfort in snacks — we were encouraged to patronise the gallery’s restaurant neighbours for sustenance — but there were drinks and plenty to feed my appetite for conversation.

I caught up with Marc Lubner, the most prominent of the Nine Yards owners, whose prettier half, Niki Judelman, is behind the much-talked-about wellness and yoga centre The Well, next door. They had a soft opening earlier on in the week.

And I greet Dion Chang and his husband, Chris Marquard, as well as photographer Trevor Stuurman, who was there with interior designer Donald Nxumalo.

Who else turned up to take in the art?

Siphiwe Mpye, the erudite former Wanted editor-in-chief, with his better half Mathahle Stofile; Thando Moleketi and husband Bradley Williams; Didi Mogashoa, who tells me she’s on track to complete her master’s in mindfulness at Bangor University in northern Wales; and energy empress Linda Mabhena-Olagunju, whom I last saw two years ago when I attended her lavish 40th birthday held at a Stellenbosch wine farm.