Ghada Amer’s (b. 1963, Cairo, Egypt) wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

William Kentridge (b.1955, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. His work was presented in Korea in a survey at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016.

Kentridge’s work is held in collections including MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.

Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad in Los Angeles. In 2023 this exhibition traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Albertina Museum, Vienna: Musée du Louvre in Paris, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia museum, Madrid, Kunstmuseum in Basel; and Norval Foundation in Cape Town. The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002,1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).

Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, South Africa) was born in the black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie.

Yellow and orange dresses (2023) is part of a new series of works in which Nhlengethwa is exploring the connection between art and fashion, as well as highlighting beauty of and visibility for people with albinism. 

Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory in Newtown, in the heart of the city, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa.

Despite Nhlengethwa’s pioneering role in South Africa art, his work has received rare visibility in London. A major survey exhibition, titled Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia in 2014, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center.

Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.

Nhlengethwa’s work has featured on a number of international biennales: in 2003, his work was included in the 8th Havana Biennale, Southern African Stories: A Print Collection, the 12th International Cairo Biennale in 2010, the 2013 Venice Biennale as part of the South African pavilion, titled Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, and in the 6th Beijing Biennale in 2015.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995, Katlehong, South Africa) is from a generation of South African photographers born after the first democratic elections of 1994. Sobekwa was recently announced as the 2023 FNB Art Prize winner, the first documentary photographer to win this prize. 

Through his participation in the Of Soul and Joy photography education programme in Thokoza in 2012, he realised that the medium of photography could be an essential tool for documenting social life

Sobekwa exhibited for the first time in 2013 as part of a group show in Thokoza organised by the Rubis Mécénat foundation. His photo essay Nyaope (2014) was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), in Vice magazine’s annual Photo Issue and in the daily De Standaard (Belgium). In 2015, Sobekwa was awarded a scholarship to study at the Market Photo Workshop. That same year his series Nyaope was exhibited in another group show, Free From My Happiness, organised by Rubis Mécénat for the International Photo Festival of Ghent (Belgium). The exhibition toured additional sites in Belgium and South Africa. 

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey, United States) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.  In January 2023, Thomas unveiled his most recent public artwork The Embrace in Boston, MA, a memorial to both the Kings and the 69 civil rights leaders in Boston. 

Thomas’s lenticular I am You / I Am Joy (2023) sees a direct interaction with Faith Ringgold’s set of collages from the 1970s. Her collages include phrases that speak to Black feminist sentiments borne out of her personal experiences. Thomas borrows Ringgold’s typographic aesthetic and layout to speak to ideas around identity in a contemporary context. The work also references the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, specifically the posters declaring “I AM A MAN.” These works, through the nature of their material, force viewers to look again, mirroring the artist’s revisiting of this historical moment and protest art more generally. 

Through this work she explores the idea of belonging to a place, a family, and a culture by investigating and reinterpreting the photographs taken by her maternal grandmother and other family members during apartheid. The photographs capture ordinary scenes of everyday life – young girls at school, a child feeding chickens, a father holding his young daughter, a child and her doll. People of colour took and displayed photographs as a way of resisting the dominative narrative that would portray them as inferior. These photographs show ordinary families as they wish to be seen and disturb the memories that we have of the apartheid narratives of subjugation. This legacy of trauma, sustained through slavery and apartheid, continues to reverberate down generations and, through her art, Marsi engages with the sense of loss and pain that threaten to displace her own narratives if not addressed now. The subject is at once personal but taps into the collective experience of what it was like to grow up “coloured” in South Africa during apartheid. By exploring her own heritage in an attempt to make sense of her roots, the artist invites viewers to recognise themselves in her work and in the reflection of those who went before her.

Walter Oltmann (b. 1960, South Africa) is a practicing artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. He obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1981), and an MA Fine Arts degree (1985) and PhD in Fine Arts degree (2017) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He taught in the Fine arts department at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1989 to 2016.

Oltmann has an extensive record of creative work produced since the early 1980s, including a number of public commissions. Since the 1980s he has developed an interest in the relationship between fine art and craft. In his own practice he employs hand-fabricated processes of making and has researched wire craft traditions in southern Africa. His sculptural works are executed by way of weaving in wire and using handcrafting methods that reference African and Western traditions of weaving. He is deeply interested in the influence of craft traditions in contemporary South African art.

In his artworks Oltmann makes connections to domestic textile practices and explores such forms of making in evoking fragility and the passage of time. He often combines aspects of decorative ornament with subject matter that seems somewhat contradictory or disturbing in relation to handcrafted embellishment.

Goodman Gallery presents new work by Jabulani Dhlamini, one of South Africa’s most recognised documentary photographers. Dhlamini’s meditative approach to photography encourages a closer look at what lies on the edges through an exploration of personal and collective memory.

As a starting point for these works, Dhlamini returned to the countryside of his childhood in the Free State in an effort to capture the landscape for its rich psychological associations. In these images the photographer explores the relationship between collective memory and private reflections within the context of apartheid and the production of post-apartheid identities. 

These works form part of an ongoing project with emerging photographer, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo. Dhlamini and Hlatshwayo communicate with each other throughout the conceptual phase of the project, sharing thoughts and images to collectively unpack their ideas of home. Each photographer produces photographs in response to this ongoing exchange. 

The first iteration of this exchange in an exhibition context was iHubo - Whispers curated by Valérie Fougeirol at the 2022 PhotoSaintGermain festival as part of the 10th-anniversary celebration of the Thokoza-based photography education programme Of Soul and Joy initiated by Rubis Mécénat; a programme for which Dhlamini is a mentor and Hlatshwayo was a student. The second iteration was iHubo: Nkosi Sikelela in Cape Town in June this year, marking the first time that these works were seen on exhibition in South Africa.