On a chilly Cape morning, Cape Town's art press gather at CAPE Africa Platform's Spin Street offices, for a preview of Cape 09. On the menu, performances, talks, walkabouts and some dangerous looking yellow and black cupcakes. The Petit Fours and the bumblebee branding are perhaps the only aspects of CAPE 09 which are hypervisible. This year's 'biennale', as it bravely proclaims itself, operates, in many respects, below the radar.

In some instances, CAPE's underground activities have yielded excellent results. Introducing CAPE 09, Cape Africa Platform CEO, Mirjam Asmal-Dik, describes several worthwhile projects which have been taking place in the background for some time. An arts awareness program appears to be doing excellent work with learners from grades 8 and 5 from schools including Nyanga, Langa, Mowbray and Seapoint, a 'Young Independents' project for tertiary students has given birth to a collective named 'Art Pays', and the eighteen month young curators project has yielded three new, young curators from previously disadvantaged backgrounds. The work on show in May and June, then, reflects a process which has been underway for a lot longer.

As Asmal-Dik also points out, the vision and aims of CAPE's biennale project have also shifted in the process; the use of expensive institutional spaces, and international artists in CAPE 07 have been abandoned in CAPE 09 for a model which takes advantage of public spaces and tries to reach new audiences. For this year's biennale, several guerilla performance works co-opt public spaces to reach new audiences. These include New Orleans curator, Claire Tancons' 'A walk into the night' project, performances by Young CAPE collective Art Pays, at the Golden Acre Centre, Mary Faragher's 'Musical Statues' at Cecil John Rhodes' statue in Government avenue, and 'Guess Who's Coming to Dine' in Church Square.

Several public buildings have also been co-opted as exhibition spaces for the biennale. Chimurenga, a local non-profit print and web publication, has taken over the Cape Town Central library with a series of interventions. Douglas Gimberg, who was called in to implement Chimurenga's project, shows us around a series of 'Reading Routes' which provide new imaginative classifications for the Dewey classified books. Chimurenga's signs, which appear more permanent than the temporary paper printout Dewey Decimal numbers of the newly relocated library, mark routes through books such as 'Insults', 'Ignorance', 'Indifference' and, hanging above the United States Consulate General, (also now housed in the refurbished Drill Hall), 'Condescension'. These routes provide an unusual means of access to the library's books, and reflect Chimurenga's years of searching through the library's content.

Other interventions in the same venue include the covering of all the spines of the South African history section with strips of flesh-toned paper, ranging in a spectrum from white to black, and a reading room complete with queen-size bed, decorated with extracts from books written by African writer's on the subject of sex. These insertions into the library are fairly subtle, and hence also represent a somewhat underground, guerilla act, re-casting and re-interpreting a public space.

The 'One Minute World' exhibition is another project which inserts itself into the public realm. Comprising 840 one-minute videos from 90 countries, the exhibition takes as its 'white cube', the television vendors in Cape Town station. Watching the mute televisions buzzing away among the crowds, one might easily miss the one minute artworks, and passersby may mistake them for SABC broadcasting as usual.

Cape Town station also plays host to Meshac Gaba's performance, Ambulant, which will likewise make only the smallest insertion into the space. On opening day, the piece's twelve performers, dressed as diplomats, will join the station's usual selection of commuters who use the station daily. Transporting vendor's suitcases holding religious artefacts, fake diamond watches and African and European flags, the performers will draw attention to the act of commuting, rather like mimes, parodying the mannerisms of their audience, potentially without the knowledge of that audience.

Perhaps the most radically anti-white cube project however, is 'Thank you Driver', for which young CAPE curator Lerato Bereng has co-opted six taxis, transforming the commute between Gugulethu, Langa, Khayelitsha, Kloof Street, Wynberg, Woodstock and Seapoint into an art experience. The taxis, which have deliberately not been branded, will contain subtle interventions from several artists, to surprise passengers. Some of the artists include The Gugulective, whose imperative that traveling by taxi is better than by air, is demonstrated by the glamorous Pamella Dlungwana, a 'Gaji' dressed as an air hostess to attend to the passengers, while Benin-born Edwige Aplogan has printed a satirical paper dated in the future, for uninitiated taxi users to read.

Lookout Hill, Khayelitsha is perhaps a conventional enough exhibition space, though the concrete walls promise to cause untold hassles for CAPE young curator Loyiso Qanya. Its location, however, in Khayelitsha, suggests the possibility of creating new art centres in communities outside of the CBD, with an accompanying arts awareness program run by Hannah Loewenthal doing much to bring youth into the centre. Qanya's project, 'Umahluko', deals with notions of difference and includes works by both locally-born artists, and other African artists sourced from Qanya's residency in Luanda.

Langa High School, where CAPE young curator, Nonkululeko Mlangeni's, 'Who Knows Where Brenda Fassie Really is? is set to take place, seems an equally useful space for the growth of new art audiences. It too comprises both an exhibition component and a performative element, and an arts awareness program for learners at the school.

The somewhat unstructured curatorial process does pose some problems, however. While the myriad curated projects eliminate the dangers posed by a too-fixed curatorial premise, and the many venues do excellent work in cultivating new audiences, the multitude of venues and a lack of coherent scheduling may make CAPE 09 a tricky beast to pin down for existing art audiences. The CAPE website, though very pretty, is also thoroughly obtuse about providing one with any kind of schedule. To access the schedule, one must click on the 09 ring, worn by the black and yellow hand, a process of trial and error for which few are likely to have the patience.

CAPE 09 then is far from what we might traditionally call a biennale. Unlike Venice's strictly classified (and somewhat problematic) national pavilions, it operates on the underground; a guerilla festival which takes the art to the public, rather than the other way around. Whilst the advertising and scheduling of events could certainly have been more effective (the CAPE site really ought to place the schedule of events on the front page of their website, rather than tucked away behind an unlabelled link), it seems more important that the project manages to reach new audiences. It certainly seems likely that CAPE's revised vision of a South African Biennale will prove to be more useful model for us than the instititutional and costly Venetian one.

Opens: May 2
Closes: June 21

CAPE AFRICA PLATFORM
8 Spin Street, Cape Town
Tel: +27 21 461-2325
Email:info@capeafrica.org
A full list of performances, interventions and exhibitions is available at http://www.capeafrica.org/schedulecape09.html