All good campaigns start with a good story — and the RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2026 is no exception. Venelize de Lange from media update considers how storytelling informed this event's cultural resonance and audience reception.
An Oasis of Soft Escapes feels almost impossibly specific to Johannesburg. This year's theme of the RMB Latitudes Art Fair perfectly captures the Joburger's propensity for a break from the grueling work week — one much needed after the hustle and bustle of the inner city.
Held at the Shepstone Gardens for its fourth edition this past weekend, the event truly emulated the ethereal world that art creates. With an emphasis on crossing the bounds of our understanding of art, the curators focused their labours on expressing its fluidity across disciplines seeking to convey the many ways contemporary African art is produced, experienced and practically sustained today.
Integrating multiple artists and galleries in an effort to showcase the African diaspora, the Latitudes organisers demonstrated exactly what the art also strives to do: create stories that exist beyond one singular narrative.
While the publicity team enforced traditional efforts of campaigning, reaching audiences across multiple digital platforms as well as utilising Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, it was the artful storytelling that brought the fair its scale of foot traffic.
The success of the RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2026 pointed towards a sort of recognition of oneself. Because art, at its best — whatever form it might take — is not simply content to be consumed, but a form of recognition: a shared understanding of what it means to exist in the world.
An Oasis of Soft Escapes offered an expansive interpretation, meaning different things to different people — rest, beauty, disconnection, intimacy, stillness — which allowed audiences to emotionally participate in the story, to step into it, rather than just observe it from the outside.
In a city such as Johannesburg, made up of vastly different lives unfolding beside one another, the fair's expansiveness allowed people to recognise fragments of themselves within it, which is perhaps what made it evoke such a strong response from its audience.
A story anchored in what binds people together and is accessible while still being emotionally resonant — that is the story that is listened to, that is the story that knows how to speak the language of its people.
And, when speaking to South Africans — the rainbow nation rich in culture and people from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences? That is exactly the stories you want to tell your audience, the ones people cannot help but be immersed in.
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*Image courtesy of Canva and Facebook
**Information sourced from iQhawe Magazine and RMB Latitudes