Performance

 

We are delighted to announce the debut of our Performance Special Project at the fair’s 13th edition, in line with this year’s guiding curatorial concept, Listen.

 

Our 2026 fair inaugurates a curated collection of artistic performances to enrich the visitor experience by offering deeper context and engagement with surrounding art.

 

Read below for a full breakdown of the performances taking place at Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026.

 

 

Leipzig and Berlin, Germany

 

 

Gabrielle Kruger’s performance painting is her first since 2019, and marks a second collaboration with renowned choreographer, Debbie Turner, and esteemed ballet performers of Cape Ballet Africa. Dancers adorned in Kruger's sculptural paint re-imagine the traditional visual language of painting into physical and moving forms, through performative expression. In Kruger's imaginary 'Garden of Metamorphoun', dancers' bodies are transformed by wearable paintings to become phytomorphic creatures, which blur the lines between human, animal and plant.

 

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

 

Driven by the need for viewers to listen and be witnesses to a situational encounter, Oupa Sibeko’s performance work views the body as split between a facet of past memory and a live, present state of mind. The audience is invited to gather as a community to listen and engage in ritualistic methods of play. In play, one takes on a status that is not embodied every day. Just as in a ritual, one ultimately steps out of the everyday self to embody a seeking of harmony or balance. Through this, we are implicated in each other's stories through humanity, history, ecology, and spirituality.

 

Cape Town, South Africa and Amsterdam, Netherlands

 

 

After its original conception in 1999, Steven Cohen's performance is a redeveloped vintage performance artwork stemming from his experience participating in a group art therapy course with other contemporary artists over eight weeks. TASTE uses the body as simply and radically as possible to resist (armed with humour) the social structures that govern our own use of our own bodies. Therapy is about integrating all aspects of the self, from the most noble to the least palatable, and along these lines, TASTE questions what is fashionable, sanitised and desirable. As well as what is not.

 

Cape Town, South Africa

 

 

Hannalie Taute's live performance is an extension of her exhibition Mother. Monster. Stitch. Centred on the single, overused phrase, 'I’m fine', the work treats reassurance not as truth, but as a social reflex used to manage discomfort, deflect concern, and smooth over situations that remain visibly unresolved. The work combines elements of wearable sculpture, restrained movement, and dry humour to explore the gap between what is said and what is shown, under the familiar pressure to appear 'okay' even when the body suggests otherwise.

 

Cape Town, Franschhoek and Johannesburg, South Africa and London, United Kingdom

 

 

Taking the 2026 Investec Cape Town Art Fair theme, Listen, into consideration, Lux & Kahlil offer a routine-based performance that is an experimentation in listening. Eavesdropping, transcribing and accounting what is heard on Instagram, the pair engage in an intensive endeavour to see how people perceive and interact with art. To eavesdrop is to listen in without permission, to overhear, or to snoop. Amongst the big and bustling space of the fair, with sound and thousands of utterances, interactions and exchanges, this performance questions what a day of purely listening at the fair entails.