Candy Bowers

Nick Cave creates fiercely beautiful, emotive and highly theatrical immersive art. He is part installation artist, part choreographer, part costumer, part sculptor, part sound artist and unceasing educator. His latest piece at Carriageworks sees him employ almost all of these disciplines to address some of the most pressing issues of our time: race relations, gender politics and gun violence. The title, “UNTIL”, is a play on the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” or, in this case, “guilty until proven innocent.” Lisa Havilah, Carriageworks’ outgoing director, said, “I think the magic of Nick Cave is he draws you in with extreme beauty but within that world he really seduces you to think in a different way.” Hers is a perfect description of the power of Cave’s work. Photograph: Daniel Boud UNTIL was created to shift hearts and minds, and is Carriageworks’ largest commission yet – co-commissioned with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), where it premiered in 2016, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. “I want to raise consciousness” Cave told Time Out. “My choice of materials or medium, or how I do this, changes year to year, but my objective always remains to create connection between people and to raise consciousness on important issues… Art can and will change attitudes.” His vision is extraordinary, using glass, light, scale and optimism to bust open the barriers. The sheer magnitude of the installation (90 per cent of whi

Earlier this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art announced a major retrospective of seminal South African photographer David Goldblatt, showcasing the evolution of his work and documenting the evolution of a nation. The museum was working closely with Goldblatt to represent the breadth of his career, leading right up to photos taken in 2018, when he died in June at the age of 87. Four weeks after Goldblatt’s passing, we spoke to MCA chief curator Rachel Kent, who’d recently driven across the country with him in preparation for the exhibition. “His health was pretty good last year; he was quite robust and healthy,” Kent says. “Just after we’d done our trip he’d had some explorative surgery and found out there were complications. That’s when they found out about the cancer. On reflection, that was his last big road trip, so I was really fortunate to share it with him.” The expansive exhibition is over 12 months in the making and will be the most significant showing of Goldblatt’s work in the Southern Hemisphere. It spans six decades, documenting the people, places, industry and landscape of South Africa; from the heart of the apartheid era, to the #rhodesmustfall movement and South Africa today.    Fifteen-year old Lawrence Matjee after his assault and detention by the Security Police, Khotso House, de Villiers Street, 1985 Photograph: David Goldblatt   “We spent quite a lot of time in Johannesburg and Soweto,” Kent said. “We drove to all the key locations where he’d made h