Flower Kid (Girl) shows the costumed figure of a child holding a bouquet of flowers that are critically endangered, speaking to the current context of global anxiety about the planet. The sculptures all incorporate a globe-like form in the position of a head printed with an astrological map. The names of the endangered flower species replace the names of the constellations and so the loss of nature here on earth is imbued with cosmic importance.

Below is a list of critically endangered flowers that were selected in the bouquet:
Iris Westii, Tiny Flowered Paphiopedilum - Paphiopedilum micranthum, Silene de Ifac - Silene hifacensis, Mosquera de Tamadaba - Globularia ascanii, Clay’s Hibiscus - Hibiscus clayi, Drury’s Paphiopedilum - Paphiopedilum druryi

Misheck Masamvu

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting giving the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. Beneath the surface of a painted image, an infinity of others exist. Through abstraction, Masamvu’s figures appear in the midst of metamorphosis, absorbed by teeming landscapes.

Nicholas Hlobo

Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around postapartheid nationhood and bodily healing.

Sue Wiliamson

In the series Postcards from Africa, Sue Williamson turns her attention to vintage postcards of photographs taken by European colonizers in Africa in the first decades of the 20th century. Part of a global craze for postcards, these were sent out as examples which supposedly demonstrated the civilizing effect of colonisation on the colonised, or presented views of exotic Africa for the edification of the folks back home. 

Clive van den Berg

Van den Berg’s 40-year practice has formed part of a small movement of artists pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history.

Throughout his practice, the artist has engaged with the idea of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. This presentation of new large-scale paintings considers the body and the land as loaded sites which carry memories and scars.

Jungerman’s panels come in various sizes and initially suggest paintings, but they are not. The panels are wooden and wrapped in plaids British-Ghanaian poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley of various colours before covering them in kaolin. In the ongoing series he made in 2020 and 2021, Jungerman adopts a collage-like approach, gluing strips of kaolintreated fabric to a primed surface. Each strip seems to evoke the next, yielding a rhythmic pulse reminiscent of the repeating sound patterns of the Agida drum—used in Winti rituals— or jazz.

In much of his artistic practice, Kudzanai Chiurai has been concerned with the cyclical contradictions of the so-called post-colony as a site of struggle, liberation, conflict, and patrimonial autocracy. His works often address aspects of Pan-Africanism and the history of colonial resistance in Africa that are often disregarded. In an interplay between text and image, Chiurai employs a revisionist strategy to disrupt what he refers to as ‘colonial futures’ – embedding alternative memories into history that remedy the omissions inherent to the colonial project.

As a series, titled Drawings and Paintings from the Radical Archive, Chiurai’s works pay homage to posters generated for the purpose of inciting public into political action in what is now remembered as the turbulent 1970s of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. By excavating these press-to-public posters and rendering them as paintings, the artist calls to attention the meditative processes required of both the painter and poster designer. The timelessness of the slogans and anthems appearing in the original posters is reiterated within Chiurai’s collage as a painful echo of their continued relevance in present day protest actions.

In so doing, the artist and works highlight the role of cultural unity and division, biopolitics, and intersections of identity, in creating the intensely multifaceted nature of post- coloniality within Africa.