What kind of art world is South Africa moving into?

A sober look at how local art is recalibrating for the long term - smaller, slower and more precarious, yet still thinking its way forward

- Lesego Chepape

The conversation returns to me now, at the beginning of 2026, with an unexpected clarity.

It took place last year at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, over dinner at the Standard Bank restaurant, 1862.

Around the table sat a curator and an artist, both mid-career, both deeply embedded in the South African art world. What began as casual talk about exhibitions, travel and work slowly settled into something more sober. Neither was complaining. They were accounting.

What they described was not collapse, but contraction: fewer opportunities, less time, thinning institutional support and a growing sense that the energy required to remain in the sector no longer matched what it could reliably offer in return. At the time, the conversation felt anecdotal. As 2026 begins, it reads as a forecast.

If the years immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic were framed as a period of recovery, that language now feels largely exhausted. The question facing South African art is no longer how to rebuild what was lost but how to operate within a reality that appears permanently altered. What is emerging is not a return to stability but a recalibrated ecosystem — smaller, slower and more precarious — that is learning how to persist under constraint.

Public funding for the arts remains unreliable, shaped by administrative delays and shifting political priorities that rarely align with the long timelines required for cultural production. Private funding, meanwhile, has grown increasingly cautious. Many institutions have not closed but have hollowed out: fewer exhibitions, shorter programmes, smaller teams and a deepening dependence on freelance labour. Curatorial ambition continues to circulate rhetorically but material support has become harder to secure.