Cape Town Art Fair 2024 | Preview

Ghada Amer (b. Cairo, 1963) has a wide-ranging practice spanning painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. 

At the end of 2023 Amer was celebrated with four concurrent gallery exhibitions in London, New York and Valencia, marking an unprecedented opportunity to experience new and historical works by the artist across continents. The artist’s retrospective A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution was organised by Mucem in 2022/3 across three venues in Marseille.

Group shows and biennials include: the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a mid career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. 

Collections include: The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Samsung Museum, Seoul

Artist and filmmaker Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Zimbabwe) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, drawing, film, painting, and sculpture. His practice is largely focused on cycles of political, economic, andsocial strife present in post-colonial societies. Combining  expressionist gestures with images and texts from popular culture, the artist tackles pressing social issues, such as xenophobia, exile, displacement, inequality, as well as the continent’s emancipation.

Chiurai’s was included in the recent exhibition at Tate Modern as a part of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography curated by Osei Bonsu. 

Chiurai’s drawings from Triangular Commerce draws inspiration from Hegel’s philosophical text entitled Theses on Africa which explores the neat systematisation of slavery – through the Atlantic slave trade connecting west America, the Americas and Europe – and the expansion of capitalism, as well as the subsequent impacts on present day Zimbabwe. Through rethinking the current cultural and political realities facing southern Africa, Chiurai confronts the structural establishment and concepts surrounding power and post-colonial system which still systemically dictate education-systems and existing cultural codes.

Chiurai’s work is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; BHP Billiton, London; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Walther Collection, New York; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town. 

Notable exhibitions include Genesis [Je n’isi isi] - We Live in Silence, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart (2020); Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); and Regarding the Ease of Others, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2017). 

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation. They are concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. 

Solo and group shows include: Lagos Biennial (2024), the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023); the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023), 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Architekturmuseum der TU München, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and ARoS Aarhus (Denmark). Their work has been on view at Kunsthalle Bern and Van Abbe Museum this year. Their work a recurse 4 [3] worlds is on view as part of Kunsthalle Basel’s ‘back wall project’ 

Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, USA) is known for his significant installations and sculptures which explore the tension between order and chaos. His work has been seen in major museums worldwide and is currently the subject of a major new commission at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK on view through 2023.

Number 353 demonstrates Drew’s approach to manipulating organic material to create richly detailed works which resemble densely populated cities, urban wastelands or organic forms and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Both works were shown in the artist’s first solo exhibition on the continent at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg earlier this year. 

Leonardo Drew is a New York-based artist and his work is held in public collections around the world, including Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.

Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009 and travelled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University (2022); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2020); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020); and de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California (2017). 2023 saw Drew produce new site-specific installations at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. 

In this ongoing and very personal series of drawings and prints, the artist summons and celebrates a chorus of both radical and quotidian femme presences: poets, priestesses, activists, artists, parents and prodigies. Beloved is an ode, a work of the heart – a labour of recognition, thanks and love.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983 South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed removed and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, in terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize - Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Recent exhibitions include Chorus, Dallas Contemporary (2022), Dallas; This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022); The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg (2021); This song is for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm (2021); Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2020); and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2020). She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.

Ixhegwana (2023) is a new work by Hlobo that is part of a recent shift in the artist’s practice from a minimal use of acrylic paint to a less inhibited approach, incorporating the medium with signature materials, particularly ribbon stitched into the canvas lending a sculptural feel. Each material in the work holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around post-apartheid nationhood, the self and bodily healing.

Nicholas Hlobo’s (b. 1975, South Africa) signature techniques include creating hybrid objects by intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. He began his career around the end of apartheid in 1994, when there was a new sense of freedom and national pride in South Africa. Hlobo’s subtle commentary on the democratic realities of his home country and concerns with the changing international discourse of art remain at the core of his work.

Hlobo will be part of a major group show opening at the Barbican in February this year, titled Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. Earlier this year, the artist was included in the major group exhibition Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics at The Institutum in Singapore, curated by Dr. Zoé Whitley. 

Hlobo’s work is included in numerous international public and private collections, including Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town. 

Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016); Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2010) and Tate Modern, London (2008). Hlobo has participated in several biennales including the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010) and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008).

Paper Procession II is from a set of new hand-painted, aluminium and steel sculptures in vivid colour. The origin of these sculptures are a series of small paper sculptures, made from the torn and coloured pages of a 19th century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo. 

William Kentridge (b.1955, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. 

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, Los Angeles. In 2023 this exhibition travelled 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).

Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built. 

Solo exhibitions include On the Mines, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Structures of Dominium and Democracy, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018); The Pursuit of Values, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt, New Museum, New York (2009), then Amherst Art Museum, Massachusett (2011); Hasselblad, Hasselblad Center, Göteborg (2006); Fifty-One Years, A Retrospective, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2005). 

Collections include the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; University of South Africa; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hasselblad Collection, Göteborg; Tate Modern, London;  Centre Pompidou, Paris and Art Institute, Chicago.

Kiwanga’s interest in the historical and symbolic affect of materials is demonstrated through the artist’s Sisal series - an arrangement of steelworks covered in sisal fibre. The golden spun fibre, harvested from the botanical plant agave sisalana, is typically used for rope and twine. Kiwanga first encountered sisal whilst travelling through rural Tanzania where this flowering plant is a primary export commodity. Fascinated by the fibre’s colour (yellow and gold) as well as the rhythmic rows of the crop, Kiwanga came to learn more about the plant in relation to Tanzania’s political, economic and social history.

In the Subduction Studies series (2015 - 2017), Kiwanga observes the space between Earth’s continents, specifically Africa and Europe. The speculation of Pangaea Ultima suggests a supercontinent occurring again, which will see Europe slipping underneath Africa. This theory inspired Kiwanga to go to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and take photographs of the rock specimens from the Northern coast of Africa and Spain. By folding the photographs together, she not only demonstrates a new form, but also a new geological perspective, where two continents and their migrants would be geographically connected

Kapwani Kiwanga is a Franco-Canadian artist based in Paris. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. 

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg recently launched Kapwani Kiwanga’s first comprehensive mid-career retrospective, The Length of the Horizon until 7 January 2024. This show includes her memorable 2022 Venice Biennale installation ‘Terrarium’.  The artist has been selected to represent Canada at their national pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Solo exhibitions include Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE); Kunstinstituut Melly – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (NLD); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (CHE); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (USA); Albertinum museum, Dresden (DE); Artpace, San Antonio (USA); Esker Foundation, Calgary (CA); Tramway, Glasgow International (UK); Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (USA); South London Gallery, London (UK); and Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR) among others.

Selected group exhibitions include Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); MOT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JPN); Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden – MACAAL, Marrakech (MAR); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA); Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (CA); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (DK) and MACBA, Barcelona (ESP).

Painter Misheck Masamvu (b. 1980, Zimbabwe) is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the Harare painting school. Trained in Germany, Masamvu continues to live and work in Zimbabwe which provides rich inspiration for his gestural painting. 

Earlier this year, Masamvu was included in the major group exhibition Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics at The Institutum in Singapore, curated by Dr. Zoé Whitley. 

Masamvu’s works are held in collections across the globe including the Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; X Museum, Beijing; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town. 

Notable solo and group exhibitions include Inside Out, Fondation Grandpour l’Art, Geneva (2022); Talk to me while I’m eating, Goodman Gallery, London (2021); Witness: Afro Perspectives, El Espacio 23, Miami (2020); Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2020); and Two Together, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2020). 

Museum exhibitions and biennales include The ‘t’ is silent, 8th Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem (2022); STILL ALIVE, 5th Aichi Triennale, Aichi (2022), NIRIN, 22nd Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2020), the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) and his international debut at Zimbabwe’s inaugural Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). 

Reverie is part of a new series of paintings in which abstract bodies in a constant state of flux emerge and multiply across the length and breadth of the canvases, interrogating tensions from contemporary politics in Kenya and wider Africa. This amalgamation of the singular and communal has been a strategy Ng’ok has used throughout her practice to push against authority, systemic violence and the long-standing legacy of colonialism.

Chemu Ng’ok (b. 1989, Nairobi, Kenya) uses painting and drawing to explore the sociopolitical, physical and psychological aspects of human relationships.

Solo shows include: An impression that may possibly last forever, ICA Milano, 2023 -  An Enigma (2021-) at CENTRAL FINE in Miami Beach and Still Waters Run (2022) at Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Group presentations include; the New Museum Triennial; Songs for Sabotage (2018)  in New York; Aletheia at CENTRAL FINE (2021); There is Always One Direction 2021-2022 Exhibition at The de la Cruz Collection in Miami; Fire Figure Fantasy (2022) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Central Sounds at Luhring Augustine (2022) and the 8th Biennial of Painting: The ‘t’ is Silent (2022) at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium.

Ng’ok received her MFA from Rhodes University, Grahamstown in 2017 and was the recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Visual and Performing Arts of Africa Masters Bursary in 2016.

Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, Payneville, Springs) part of a pioneering generation of late 20th century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of their country. Through his paintings, collages and prints Nhlengethwa has depicted the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion. 

The Blue Coat and Stetson II see the artist explore the connection between art and fashion, highlighting his fascination with how people dress themselves to represent who they are and how they view the world. 

Selected solo exhibitions include: Jazz and Blues at night, Goodman Gallery, London (2021);  Leeto: Print retrospective, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2019); IN FOCUS: SAM NHLENGETHWA, The University of Michigan Museum, Michigan (2017); Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2014); Townships Re-visited, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2006); and Homage to Jazz, Standard Bank Young Artist Award travelling show, South Africa (1994-5). 

Group exhibitions include: Through an African Lens: Sub-Saharan Photography from the Museum’s Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020). Travelling to Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia until 11 March 2024; TRANS, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg (2018); BEYOND BORDERS: GLOBAL AFRICA, The University of Michigan Museum, Michigan (2018); South Africa: The Art of a Nation, British Museum, London (2017); New Revolutions: Goodman Gallery at 50, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); Contemporary Art / South Africa, Yale University Art Gallery (2014); Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, South African Pavilion, 55th la Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2013); 12th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo (2010); Strengths and Convictions: The lives and times of South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Iziko SA National Gallery, Cape Town (2009); New Identities – Contemporary South African Art, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Bochum (2004); 8th Havana Biennale, Havana (2003); and Africa 95, Whitechapel, London (1995). 

Collections include: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; World Bank, Washington D.C; Botswana Art Museum, Gaborone; Anglo American, Johannesburg; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg; Nelson Mandela Foundation; Johannesburg; and Durban Art Gallery, Durban.

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based painter whose practice mines the haunting reverberations of history, extracted from archival photography and inherited memories. As a starting point, the artist collects family photographs stretching back generations alongside a broader archive of portrait and landscape photography as imperfect portals into the past.

The process of meeting the canvas with unstable imagery is underpinned by an inevitable grappling with the legacies of colonialism and migration. Questions around agency to shape familial and national narratives, as well as access to power and land ownership, haunt Pillay’s polarised family history primarily as descendants of Indian indentured workers but also, more distantly, of British aristocrats, speaking to wider social issues in contemporary South Africa and beyond. 

Beekeeper (Boy) II is a playful new sculpture by Shonibare that depicts a young boy wearing a Victorian style ‘bee veil’ over the artist’s signature globe in place of a head. The figure is studying a bee which he holds aloft from his basket containing rows of honeycomb. Fascinated by geographical and cultural identity and the natural world, Shonibare fuses these different references in this work. The child’s Victorian costume has been refashioned from Dutch wax batik fabric. A hallmark of Shonibare’s practice, the brightly coloured patterned batik fabric is a symbol of African identity. Designed in Indonesia, these fabrics are produced in the Netherlands and sold in West Africa.

Over the past four decades, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962, UK) has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work examines race, class, and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. 

Shonibare’s work will also be part of the official Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in April. A solo exhibition of his work will be presented at the Serpentine Galleries, London later this year. 

The artist’s work is held in notable museum collections including Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Tate, London; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Recent survey exhibitions and retrospectives include Yinka Shonibare CBE: Planets in My Head; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Michigan (2022) and Yinka Shonibare CBE: End of Empire; Museum der Moderne; Salzburg (2021).

In 2022, Shonibare unveiled three major sculptural works in Stockholm, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. In recent years, he has unveiled work from his Wind Sculpture series at Norval Foundation in Cape Town (2019) and Central Park, New York (2018). Shonibare was also nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, and in 2002, he created one of his most recognised installations, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for Documenta XI.

Tavares Strachan (b. 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas) references aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology to create monumental allegories through multiple mediums to communicate stories of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. His work also responds to how power operates in the production and recording of a singular narration of history. 

Unimaginable Triumph uses text and subject matter from his fifteen-year-long project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility - an ongoing anthology of hidden stories that have been left out of history. The tapestry weaves layered references together and draws from Strachan’s emphasis on articulating multiple histories.

Central to the show is The Encyclopedia of Invisibility - a fifteen-year-long project resulting in an ongoing anthology of hidden stories that have been left out of history. This work anchors his thematic and material voyages, emphasising the necessity for articulating multiple histories, and how power operates in the production and recording of a singular narration of history. 

Notable solo exhibitions include: You Belong Here/We Belong Here (Site Specific Installation), Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York (2021); You Belong Here, Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans (2014); The Immeasurable Daydream, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2013); Polar Eclipse, The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013); Seen/Unseen, Undisclosed Exhibition, New York (2011); Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2010). 

Group shows include: Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2022); The Willfulness of Objects, The Bass Museum, Miami (2020); May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff, The 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2019, Venice (2019); The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility, 54th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2018); Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/ Giuffrida Collection, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (2017); and Bringing the World Into the World, Queens Museum, New York (2014). 

Strachan’s work is held at museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Bass, Miami; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Musée d’art contemporain, Lyon; The Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and RISD Museum at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Ke ya gae forms part of Sunstrum’s new body of work that plays out the fictional narrative of a femme fatale figure who embodies the precarity, suspicion and defiance that comes with a return and desire for access. The figure is seen in gathering spaces; lines outside bureaucratic buildings, seating areas outside the home, by the river. Occupying the liminal spaces of colonial outposts and government offices, the vulnerability of requesting permission to leave or stay is poignant. It brings to the surface the residue and hierarchy of colonial power structures. The figure’s ambiguity is highlighted through her staged positions and disjointed placement within the environment, coupled with her translucent appearance. This provides an interrogation of border politics in the geopolitical sense as well as a feeling of being on the border, an outsider, within one’s immediate circumstances.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Botswana) multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, installation and animation. Her work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Sunstrum’s drawings take the form of narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient, shifting between representational and fantastical depictions of volcanic, subterranean, cosmological and precipitous landscapes. Her work ‘The Pavilion’ (2023) was shown at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE last year and was Sunstrum’s first UK solo exhibition at a public institution.

One of Sunstrum’s most notable projects in London came in the form of a 2018 mural which wrapped around the exterior of The Showroom. The work was dedicated to South African Novelist Bessie Head and formed part of the exhibition titled Women on Aeroplanes, curated by The Otolith Group, Emily Pethick, and Elvira Dyangani Ose.

Key exhibitions and performances include: All my seven faces at Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA (2019); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; The Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2019); Kunsthaus Zürich (2019); The Nest, The Hague (2019); Michaelis School for the Arts at the University of Cape Town (2018); Artpace, San Antonio, TX, USA (2018); The Phillips Museum of Arts, Lancaster (2018); Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Interlochen (2016); NMMU Bird Street Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth (2016); Tiwani Contemporary, London (2016); VANSA, Johannesburg (2015); Brundyn Gallery, Cape Town (2014); FRAC Pays de Loire, France (2013); the Havana Biennial (2012); and MoCADA, New York (2011).

Postcards from Africa is a series of ink drawings based on postcards from the early 1900s, produced for residents and travellers in Africa as well as for collectors who had never set foot on the continent. These postcards, which peaked in popularity at that time, now contribute to understanding political and cultural changes in Africa as the rise of the new medium coincided with the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. In Williamson’s re-drawn scenes from these postcards, all the figures have been left out: a reference to the scourge of slavery, which saw 12.5 million people shipped from the continent to the Americas.

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s). 

A major retrospective of her five-decades long career will be shown at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2025 following her UK and US institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Important international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, Plymouth (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002). 

Group exhibitions include: Breaking Down the Walls - 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko, Iziko South African Museum (2022); RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); Women House, La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); Being There, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001-2).

Williamson’s works feature in museum collections, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Pompidou Centre, (Paris), Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). Williamson has authored two books - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).

Landscape Marked I continue Van den Berg’s engagement with the idea of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. In these works the artist continues to reflect on his own complex relationship to landscape with this body of work communicating a more visceral articulation of this engagement. This is embedded in the quality of the paint as much as the construction of the paintings and the abstract imagery that emerges on the canvas.

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer. Working across various mediums throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career, which has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history, Van den Berg has produced a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire and body.

Solo exhibitions include Landscape Echoes, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2023); Fugitive Marks, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Underscape, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021); Remembering, a survey exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures at the Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Art Gallery, Durban (2021); Coming to the City, London (2012); and Personal Affects, Museum of African Art, New York (2005). 

Group exhibitions include If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future: Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection, The African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas (2023); Breaking Down the Walls: 150 years of Art Collecting, Iziko SANG, Cape Town (2023); 25 Years of ArtThrob, Under Projects, Cape Town (2022); Screening of Memorials Without Facts: Men Loving, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (2018); Silence calling from one continent to another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021); Earth Matters: Lands as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2013-2014); and Sculptures in the Landscape, Nirox Foundation, Johannesburg (2009). 

Much of van den Berg’s practice is activated in public space where he has been the exhibition designer for the Holocaust and Genocide Centre, The Nelson Mandela Foundation, The Workers Museum, The Womens Jail, all in Johannesburg, as well as Freedom Park in Tshwane, amongst others. 

Van den Berg’s retrospective, titled Porous, will take place at the Wits Art Museum in late 2024.