Yes, ok, it's been up for a while, but now that I've finally crawled over to Michael Stevenson to see their Distant Relatives/Relative Distance show it's time to say something about it (lest anyone accuse us of only showing pictures of Ruth's wet t.shirt etc.)

Anyway, firstly I have to point out that the title reeks of annoying early nineties pretention - c'mon just get over yourselves, this is about as bad as writing words with brackets in that make other words - "in(site)" etc.

The show, however, is an important one with lots of uber-famous people from catalogues like Julie Mehretu and Owusu Ankomah and it's great to finally see artists from Africa that seem to have already been exhibited everywhere else in the world.

In terms of the actual work itself, I really liked Wangechi Mutu's video (much nicer than her collages) and it was nice to see Seenam Okudzeto and Owusu-Ankomah's paintings in the flesh so to speak. Generally though, I felt there was a certain contemporaneity missing from the show - a bit too much Modernist idealism (big abstracted painting. ooh colour, form etc) to be that interesting.

Either way, I think Michael Stevenson has set a good precident here by bringing some renowned artists from around the continent to SA.