Durban: 1 to 12 September 2010 For 12 days Durban will play host to a dazzling 12th edition of the international contemporary dance festival, JOMBA! One of four annual festivals hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Creative Arts, the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience has become synonymous with cutting-edge dance theatre, and with principle funding from the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund capacitating the festival, this bumper event contains a programme of broad scope and appeal.

Creative Week Cape Town 2010 will take place from 24 September to 3 October. It is a key showcase of Creative Cape Town to engage locals in the numerous quality creative offerings of the city.

Please keep and eye open for these works which are missing from Standard Bank Corporate collection Cape Town and London:

Diane Victor's recent exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape, once again demonstrates her ability to combine flawless technical skill with boundless imagery and sharp messages, while still looking very current. Comprising 65 individual works, Victor's All Smoke and Mirrors at Goodman is made up of five distinct series of drawings, etchings, and embossings.

Brett Bailey and Jay Pather organized a program of interdisciplinary works for the 2008 Spier Performing Arts Festival, which they staged in non-traditional venues throughout Cape Town. Their emphasis on the interdisciplinary peaked with the Festival's grand finale, Talking Heads, directed by Bailey. Tapping into the fascination many local visual artists hold for the archive, Bailey chose an archive, Cape Town's historic Centre for the Book, for his "living archive", Talking Heads. Its contents, a collection of forty "experts from a wide range of fields", were installed respectively at forty café tables with black table-cloths and polished brass numbered disks in the Centre's main hall.

Art appreciation is an embodied experience, full stop. A picture in a magazine does not equate with a physical object in a gallery. A review, no matter how finely crafted, cannot substitute for the experience of looking. But we cannot be everywhere all the time, which partly accounts for the massive publishing industry that has grown up around art. The printed word here is dangerous, particularly when it manifests as opinion. All too often opinion, the rocket fuel of the art world, is treated as fact. Living in a society that constantly looks for affirmation and insight to some imagined centre – Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York – the risk this opinion poses is amplified.

After six years at the helm of Art South Africa, Sean O'Toole is stepping down as print magazine editor. This spring edition of the magazine, on shelves in September, will be his last.

Thank you Sean for your hard work and dedication - Suzette, Brendon and the Art South Africa team.

South African literature has always been constitutionally focused on the now even when framed as historical or speculative, writes Andrew van der Vlies

The particularities and grit of South Africa's interregnum have, to a large extent, dissipated.

The way in which cities are seen and recorded by artists is of increasing interest to social scientists. Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC), an inter-disciplinary research centre based at the University of Cape Town, has made looking at art about cities integral to his enquires into urban development. Counter-Currents, a recent edited volume of the ACC's research, included many examples of how artists have interpreted Cape Town's urban sprawl.

Jodi Bieber's recent Time magazine cover shoot of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghani woman mutilated by her in-laws, is a big conversational topic right now. Art South Africa applauds Bieber for her reportage work. It bears noting, however, that Bieber isn't the only South African photographer to shine abroad in recent weeks.

Dylan Lewis, the Cape Town sculptor who in the 2000s achieved international acclaim for his gestural sculptures of feline predators, is currently showing a selection of his new works at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. The exhibition, entitled Untamed, features a selection of his recent animal-human figures.

"Painting is unforgiving, instantly revealing levels of integrity, which can be veiled in other mediums," states Lisa Brice in an interview with fellow painter Godfried Donkor in the spring 2010 edition of Art South Africa.

Musa Nxumalo, the young Johannesburg photographer whose black and white photos of Soweto youth with a deep-seated love for alternative rock propelled him into the national spotlight last year, is due to show new work at Johannesburg's Afronova Gallery (September 17 – October 16).