STRANGE CARGO, essays on art, edited by Sven Christian

542pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Milan, 2021

A collection of 40 essays by Ashraf Jamal, written between 2019 and 2021.

"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)

"Unafraid to provoke the ire of the demigods of currency or cancellation, Ashraf Jamal comes to the artwork with his whole self, as if life depended on it—which, for many of us, it does. His writing asserts the adrenalising power of the art object. From a position of radical unfixity, he moves his dowsing stick across the surfaces of South African contemporary culture to divine the groundwater from the toxic slimes-dams of what he calls this 'phantom democracy'." Alexandra Dodd, writer and editor

Ashraf Jamal is Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-author of Art in South Africa: the future present and author of In the World: Essays on contemporary South African art and Predicaments of Culture in South Africa", as well as the novel Love Themes for the Wilderness.