Marlene Dumas is celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form. In her oil paintings, drawings and watercolours she captures the body in all its states, from pain to pleasure, eroticism to pathos, birth to death. These works often focus on the body as a contested site with regard to issues such as race, pornography and illegal immigration, but they also address such timeless themes as mortality, sexuality and childhood. Above all, they express a boundless faith in the power of painting to communicate complex psychological realities with eloquence and humour.

On Thursday the 25th of March, a new sculptural installation by Andries Botha was dedicated at The Hudson, a recently erected office building in De Waterkant on the edge of Cape Town's central business district. Entitled, Latitude 33º55'S. Longitude 18º 22'E, the work was commissioned by The Hudson's developer Gerald Phillips.

The Absa L'Atelier awards figure prominently in the lexicon of sought-after credentials for the South African artist. For that reason, it is surprising that the March 19th opening of the 23rd Absa L'Atelier Regional Exhibition at art.b Gallery in Bellville was a modest affair, attended by only an estimated eighty visitors. Art.b officials in fact indicated that this year's Absa L'Atelier was less of a draw than their other exhibitions.

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.

Art appreciation is an embodied experience, full stop. A picture in a magazine does not equate with a physical object in a gallery. A review, no matter how finely crafted, cannot substitute for the experience of looking. But we cannot be everywhere all the time, which partly accounts for the massive publishing industry that has grown up around art. The printed word here is dangerous, particularly when it manifests as opinion. All too often opinion, the rocket fuel of the art world, is treated as fact. Living in a society that constantly looks for affirmation and insight to some imagined centre – Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York – the risk this opinion poses is amplified.

Recently retired from Michaelis School of Fine Art, where he is a professor emeritus, Malcolm Payne is a key figure in this country's experimental and conceptual practice. Coming to prominence in the early 1970s, Payne has distinguished himself as a sculptor, printmaker and video artist. Seated in his Kalk Bay studio, surrounded by a suite of new beard paintings, Payne considers the early influence of Walter Battiss, Marcel Duchamp and musician Jeff Mpakati on his life and work. Dismissive of the way struggle art collaged stock images of violence, he also ventures a thought on how artistic practice can refashion the way we think and speak about art.

An indomitable figure in the recent history of South African art, Wayne Barker emerged during a period when the neo-expressionist idiom was at its height. Although celebrated for his mixed-media painting, his practice encompasses so much more: printmaking, installation, performance and curation, his various activities typically informed by his bawdy sense for fun and provocation. On the eve of his 25-year retrospective, Barker talks to Robert Sloon about destroying Pierneef, inventing Andrew Moletsi, opening the Famous International Gallery, interpreting the legends of South African life and why the studio remains his most important ally.