I meet Bonolo Kavula in her studio - a tidy white box in a confused building of many faces, located in the formerly industrial part of Woodstock, Cape Town. If this sentence sounds chaotic, it is because it is. Depending on which entrance you use, you might find yourself winding down the curved spine of the driveway, into the cavernous darkness of a parking lot.

Using the other access point, you’ll walk past a high-end rug store with heavy, black signage and a popular coffee chain franchise; faux Cape Dutch architecture painted in garish, gaudy brights. There’s something about this place that just doesn’t make sense. Harshly-lit furniture, decor and design stores scream desperately against the red-brown face of exposed brick. Grim fluorescence is sucked into pillars and balustrades, coated in the grey of times.

It’s a dreary reminder that the world is going ashen. Industrial minimalism has become a prison for the intellectually indolent. According to an analysis of a selection from the Science Museum Group Collection, the world is being desaturated of colour.

It’s a strange thing to have a person, name, place or thing named after you. Romulus, for example, the eponymous founder of Rome, was allegedly born of a virgin, raised alongside his twin by a wolf, and murdered his brother shortly after the two of them established their own city on the hills overlooking the Tiber River. To be Roman then, is not only to be of Rome, but to pledge some kind of tacit allegiance to the leader nurtured by a kind Canis lupus.

Even stranger then when the thing named after you, can only be used to describe you, your style, your way of navigating the world. This can lead to many misreadings. Or rather, incomplete readings. How does one assess the artistic and cultural merit of a work or movement if all its parts can only be measured in relation to themselves?

Enter Roger Ballen, quite frequently described as the 21st century photographer most committed to making visual the more grotesque parts of the mind.

Bonolo Kavula: What It Really Means To Be Sovereign

Ballenesque: Becoming Eponymous Part One