Featured Artworks
Latitudes Artists
Artist Features
Get to know our favorite artists with our exclusive interviews.
Conversations that bring art to life
Behind the Scenes
Experience intimate on-camera conversations with the voices shaping the art world.
Featured
Artist Directory
Latest art news the continent
Editorial
Featured
Exhibitors
Non-profit Organisations
Bag Factory
Johannesburg, Gauteng, ZA
Established in 1991, Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, Johannesburg. We provide studio space to a cross-generational community of Johannesburg-based artists. We also host a prestigious international artists’ residency and awards programme, alongside regular exhibitions that showcase new work by emerging artists to the wider public. We are affiliated with the international Triangle Network. All our programmes are accompanied by events and outreach projects that encourage greater understanding of contemporary visual art and stimulate interaction between artists and the local community. With a pioneering 32-year history of providing a supportive infrastructure for artists, Bag Factory is unique in combining art making with cultural debate and art exhibitions, thereby creating a fertile international environment for experimentation, innovation and cultural dialogue between creatives in South Africa and the rest of the world.
Gallery Website | Instagram | Facebook
Independent Artists
Chelsea Selvan
Johannesburg, ZA
Chelsea Selvan (b.1997) holds a BA Fine Arts, with distinction, from the University of the Witwatersrand, and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. She currently heads the Content Department for Latitudes Online and the RMB Latitudes Art Fair.
Selvan has long held two parallel commitments - her professional life and her artistic practice - and has shaped a career that moves fluidly between both. Earlier roles at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, William Kentridge's the Centre for the Less Good Idea and the Wits Art Museum inculcated a keen interest in the way various genres and mediums of art and performance can intersect across gallery, museum and online spaces, which continues to inform how she thinks about making and showing work.
She was the 2022 recipient of the Absa L'Atelier Award - an opportunity that has continued to open doors and expand access within the broader arts ecosystem. In August 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition with Gallery 2, and between March and April 2026, Selvan was selected for an international residency at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris - marking a defining milestone in her artistic practice.
Selvan is driven by art and its ability to evoke emotion, challenge perspectives and spark dialogue - and remains deeply committed to both the making of work and the broader ecosystem that sustains it.
Selvan’s practice spans painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking to produce abstract, mixed-media works that take, as a conceptual point of departure, the ephemerality of place and memory, creating layered, dynamic, affect-laden compositions.
Having long been preoccupied with architectural memory, as well as the intangibility of emotional memory, Selvan works with intuitive, fluid colour fields and incidental mark-making as a way of tentatively notating these unfixed forms and fugitive recollections.
For Selvan, history is a collage that plays out across shifting fields of colour, form, narrative, and relentless sentiment. Evident in all of her work is the quiet intelligence of the hands – allowing organic gesture to lead and find form – paired with a constant pursuit of meaning. If our minds are compelled to make sense of the world, then Selvan’s use of abstraction – preoccupied as it is with time and memory – is at once a gentle refusal of reason and an open-hearted attempt at making new sense of the world through fragmentation, materiality, and gesture.
Exhibitions
Shows
