HEAT
August 6 to 16, 2025
Heat is a winter arts festival set in Cape Town's City Centre, featuring art exhibitions complimented by jazz, opera, theatre and digital art programming.
Our Mission
Art galleries and arts practitioners experience a lull during Cape Town's winter months. This is due to the inclement weather and fewer tourists.
HEAT festival was created to boost visitors to galleries in the city centre and to create another platform for live performances.
Through our themed programme and map HEAT has provided the context to unite art galleries that are walking distance from each other and different art forms.
Our winter programme is intended to inject energy and interest during a quiet time of the year in Cape Town.
With a focus on small art businesses, emerging artists and live performers, musicians and singers, we aim to support young cultural producers and those that create visibility for them.
The organisers hope to establish an annual event that will grow in terms of participants, programming and audiences serving as a yearly cultural highlight that will draw local and international audiences who will feel encouraged to visit its art node in the Cape Town's city
centre in winter.
Festival Theme:
Other Worlding
Speculation is a “friend with a difference, for it lends to the world of the concrete, the material, the sensory and the ordinary, the element of its capacity to be other than what it is in the present.” Arjun Appadurai (2014:207)[1]
Can we escape the present or the past, when even the speculative worlds born from artists' imaginations draw upon them? Conversely, can the speculative gaze, shall we call it, be suppressed when current and historical conditions begin to weigh on a society? As Walidah Imarisha (2015)[2]points out: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.”
The relationship between the speculative gaze and history speaks of the double- sided nature of, or is it the intertwining of truth and fiction with the one seemingly unable to exist without the presence of the other. This echoes the splintered conceptual life of the word speculation, which can be traced to its Latin origins, where there was a distinction between speculum (reflecting glass or mirror) which embodied sight and confronting reality (awareness) and specula (watchtower) referring to insight, a vision beyond the present-day, the known (Rogers, 2021:).[3]
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Futurity within decolonial speculative practices relies on creating 'other-worlding' through knowledge production that draws from the past in the act of (re) imagining a future. Speculative art at its core is concerned with process as the event, and not only creates futures but tells us about where we are as communities, and countries based on the desires we situate in our futures.
Speculation isn't grounded in naivety or toxic positivity, but rather truths informed by our pasts which may make us shudder, gain perspective, or find the light in the historicised darkness.
The speculative turn in cultural production has become an empowering tool that upends the given rules of our society, making way for alternate histories and futures. Digital art, which will feature in HEAT 2025, is naturally concerned with building alternative worlds and within this sphere, there is a distinction (Kunzelman, 2022: )[5]between the abstraction of contemporary conditions into a science fictional fabulation (like a mirror) and those metaverses that push beyond the limits of reality in the manner of the watchtower analogy.
For the 2025 iteration of the HEAT Festival, we invite artists and curators to delve into speculation as a mode of production — reflecting on its potential to disrupt, transform, and reimagine the processes and products of artistic practice.
We are interested in artists who explore; what it means to approach artmaking through speculation. How might this lens allow them to claim freedom within their artistic processes, breaking from narratives of the zeitgeist and global art market demands? We’re interested in whether speculative practices can resist the violent commodification of histories, traumas, and narratives. Can speculation be used as a methodology to relocate meaning—from the representational and figurative toward abstraction, from oppressive systems of value maximisation toward emancipatory possibilities?
Compiled by curators; Voni Baloyi, Mary Corrigall and Nkgopoleng Moloi.
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End Notes:
[1] Arjun Appadurai, “Speculation, After the Fact,” in Speculation, Now, ed. Vyjayanthi Venutur- upalli Rao, Prem Krishnmurthy, and Carin Ruoni (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
[2] Imarisha, W. (Ed.). (2015). Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction stories from social justice movements. AK Press.
[3] Rogers, Gayle. Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7312/roge20020.
[4] Butler, Philip. Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations. 1st ed. 2021. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9.
[5] Kunzelman, Cameron. The World Is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games. München Wien: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110719451.
[6] https://www.academia.edu/70715106/Speculation_as_a_Mode_of_Production_in_Art_and_Capital
APPLICATIONS
The content of the festival is guided by a curatorial theme. The 2025 theme set by curators Voni Baloyi, Mary Corrigall and Nkgopoleng Moloi is titled Other Worlding and refers to the speculative turn in art, which speaks to the core of imaginative thinking - pushing beyond the present realities, creating alternative worlds and thinking in which the weight of history can be renegotiated. Speculative art not only creates futures but tells us about where we are as communities, and countries based on the desires we situate in our futures.
We are looking for modest live performances by rising or young and well-established practitioners - theatre-makers, stand-ups, performance artists, dancers, musicians, singers - that can be accommodated in makeshift and conventional venues.
One-handers or solo performances that speak to the theme would be ideal. It could be dance, theatre or stand-up or a digital art experience. It needs to be from 40 to 60 minutes long. It can be a work you have presented before. Performers must have a proven record - have performed for at least 2 years.
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Curators
Mary Corrigall is an award-winning arts journalist and has curated numerous mulit-disciplinary art events (such as The 55 Minute Hour) and themed art tours in Cape Town and Joburg focussed on connecting the dots between spaces and ideas in art. She has also published reports analysing the South African and African art ecosystems such as The South African Art Market: Patterns & Pricing (2019). Her art consultancy Corrigall & Co offers research on different arts ecosystems and assists collectors, artists and non-profit organisations.
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Nkgopoleng Moloi is a writer and curator based in Cape Town. She recently curated "Practices of Self-Fashioning", an exhibition exploring queer mobility, at the Goethe-Institut in Joburg and was part of the curatorial team of Infecting the City (2023). She is the editor of Art Throb.
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Voni Baloyi worked in a commercial gallery in Cape Town after obtaining a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and Law from the University of Cape Town in 2020. She has also recently completed Honours in Curatorship with the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town. She recently co-curated An Ode to Wild Cliffs: Moments In Time in the Elgin Valley.
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Melissa Nzuza is curating the digital content of the festival. She is the external ops manager at Free Lives and a director of The Playtopia Foundation.
Her passion lies within the growth of the South African games industry and the creation of a more inclusive industry. Melissa fosters these goals by hosting various community events at Maker’s Massive, co-organizing Playtopia Festival and providing funding opportunities to local game developers through the Free Lives Jam Dole.
