Andy Anderson

Ruth HartleyMpapa Gallery, Visual Arts, Zambia10 Comments

My friend and a friend of Zambian art and artists Andy Anderson, a very kind and good friend died recently. I remember him with great affection and gratitude. He was not only a personal friend but a committed supporter of art in Zambia. As an architect, he had a love of design and the visual arts as anyone who visited […]

Things & Thoughts, Objects & Non-objects, Zen & Zoom

Ruth HartleyJourney, Philosophy3 Comments

‘Things are points of stability in life,’ the South Korean-born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his new book, Undinge (Nonobjects), ‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ I read this article titled Byung-Chul Han: How objects lost their magic by Gesine Borcherdt in the online Art Review and felt it was important for me without […]

Simon Zukas

Ruth HartleyApartheid, Family, Freedom Fighters, History, Mpapa Gallery, Southern Africa, Zambia13 Comments

Simon Zukas, a kind and principled freedom fighter There are people in one’s life who are so important and yet so much woven into the fabric of that life that you take them for granted. This is true even of the people in our families, parents, siblings and also spouses. There comes a sudden moment when you realise that you […]

Belonging and longing for home

Ruth HartleyDisplacement, Exile, Home, Identity, Journey, Migration, Race, Refugee2 Comments

Settlers and the unsettled I grew up in a settler community of new homes but the land we took was already the home of African peoples. Many of my school friends’ families were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who had nowhere else to go and hoped one day to go to Israel. I quote from a friend Paul M who […]