Jonah Sack, a self-described paper fetishist, is rapidly garnering acclaim for his patiently achieved ink drawings. He tells Sean O'Toole about his indebtedness to a close family friend

Jonah Sack is Art South Africa's sixth Bright Young Thing for 2008

Andrzej Nowicki is Art South Africa's fifth Bright Young Thing for 2008

Drawing on references and influences outside of the traditional highbrow art context, Andrzej Nowicki showcases a playful engagement with ephemera from popular culture. Brett Murray is impressed

It's a familiar routine: crap show by crap artist in crap gallery serving crap wine. Robert Sloon pulls up his jeans and braves another dubious Wednesday night opening in Cape Town "Um," I say. I'm wearing my glasses so it passes off as something intelligent anyway. I'm chatting to the gallerist at an exhibition opening in the centre of town, Cape Town that is, and I'm riffing on the centres of art power moving to Woodstock – how art is the vanguard of an insipid gentrification, inner city living, that leaves the poor worse off. The gallerist starts looking around to see who else has arrived. Maybe she's also started contemplating the cheap rent out there....to read more see v6.4

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.

Is it possible for public art projects to address issues of social and cultural justice? Yes, argues Zayd Minty in his profile of doual'art, a Cameroonian public art organisation

Johannesburg is a flat metropolis. Having lived here for five years I became used to driving past nowhere in particular to get to the somewhere else I seemingly needed to be. Increasingly ambivalent to the sterile, vacuous network of acceptable, function-orientated geographical and social nodes, I found greater currency in the random, empty drifts of unused and seemingly unclaimed land occupying the time and space between the binaries of here and there. These pastures became an antidote to the normative middle-class machinations on which my life in Johannesburg was, and continues to be most contingent. While the intriguing proposition that Johannesburg is the largest land-locked city on earth not built on a major river initially prompted this project, a boyish imperative to simply explore made it manifest. I started by trying to find and navigate the city's surprising number of rivers. The fact of photographing what I saw became a catalogue of endeavour – proof I had been to these quietly picturesque but largely invisible spaces that snake, squeeze and wallow between Johannesburg's sprawling ribs, ligatures and nodes.

Walking from uMkhumbane, an informal settlement and township formerly known as Cato Manor in Durban, following the N3 highway, via suburbia, through the heart of the city to the port – from one periphery to another - I became intrigued by, amongst other things, the growth of plants at the meeting points (or in-between spaces) of the primary dividing-controlling elements of the urban framework. These plants pop up in the gaps where the boundary wall meets the pavement, where the pavement meets the street, even between paving bricks and the cracks in roads. These are the interstitial spaces where human control fails. This is where life and nature prevail.

At first glance there is nothing special about the urban furniture being used by the immigrant motor mechanics at the entrance to the Drill Hall, in central Johannesburg. However, the benches, which have been purposedesigned for the mechanics' needs, look disjunctive for the simple reason that urban planning in Johannesburg does not ordinarily make provision for informal trade – particularly trade by foreign African nationals.

For most immigrants in Johannesburg, harassment by the police is a constant, leading to the criminalisation of activities and a sense of non-belonging.

Using the sidewalk along the Drill Hall fence, the predominantly Mozambican and Zimbabwean mechanics make a living providing motor-related services to owners of taxis and private motor vehicles. Their activities are in direct contravention of city by-laws. Metro Police raids are therefore frequent. Not only are mechanics fined, tools are confiscated, livelihoods lost.

In response to this situation, artists Jair Straschnow and Bert Kramer used the palisade fencing to act as a support strut for their design intervention, a seating and workbench that incorporates tool lock up facilities. The artists did not obtain permission to produce the work in this public space.

Their project's innovation lies in the design of the benches, which slide in and out of the fence, in and out of Drill Hall property, also in and out of the public realm where informal trade is outlawed.

These workbenches provide some sort of agency in a world otherwise characterised by alienation and social exclusion. They also represent a positive case study of how a culture programme can offer much-needed urban infrastructure.

Walking past the YWCA in Braamfontein, en route to document a site further on, I was momentarily taken by an array of 'living' material strewn across the floor in the alcove of a building. The absence of the body using that space was present in the arrangement of items, but nowhere to be seen. Returning 15 minutes later, the alcove was mysteriously cleared of its contents. Searching for the mysterious interlocutor, I found the living material from the alcove neatly packed several meters away. Walking back to my office I was struck by the momentary and fluid nature of self organization, how users of the city dependant on the street shape and shift its form and appearance.

Established in 1996 by Clémentine Deliss, Metronome is a print publication with no editorial team or regular time structure. Published in various formats from locations as diverse as Berlin, Dakar, Oregon, Paris and Tokyo, its contributors have included artists Kendell Geers, Penny Siopis and Issa Samb, art writer Matthew Collings, curators Catherine David and Simon Njami, as well as philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Art South Africa spoke with Deliss, former artistic director of the artist-led festival africa95, about the evolution of this quintessentially nomadic publication

Food, friends and fashion too

Tracking the ambivalence of art and public space

DAVID BRODIE OFFERS A DETAILED READING OF SELECT ANIMAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PIETER HUGO, SANTU MOFOKENG, GUY TILLIM AND GRAEME WILLIAMS

Fashion photographer Koto Bolofo is due to exhibit in South Africa in July. Internationally acclaimed, his photography is firmly rooted in a late modernist expression. Also established as an independent filmmaker, his visual production reveals a unique poetic sensitivity

In 2004, choreographer Robyn Orlin staged a site-specific performance at the Johannesburg Art Gallery as part of the annual Dance Umbrella showcase. The performance included the gallery's security staff. Photographer Neo Ntsoma collaborated with Orlin in producing this visual record of the performance.