Mario Pissarra

Mario Pissarra has great difficulty deciding what profession he belongs to. He wanted to be an artist, but he went to university. Since then he has done some lecturing, a bit of curating, quite a lot of writing, and a fair amount of editing. Sometimes he makes art. He also keeps a faded image of himself as a deejay.

These days it’s easier to say what he does because he is employed by the organisation he founded (Africa South Art Initiative), and he is a student at UCT. His thesis title is very long: ‘Through the lenses of decolonisation: Reading colonial and postcolonial Africa in and through the paintings of Sam Ntiro and Malangatana Ngwenya’.

None of this means anything when he watches his son play soccer, although it all seems to come together when he dreams of the Indian Ocean.

If you want to see what kind of visual arts stuff he thinks is important, visit