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Micha Serraf

If we do not dream, we cannot rest

Goodman Gallery Cape Town

Open from 27 March 2025

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Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Cape Town-based artist Micha Serraf. Marking a significant milestone, this is the first time a body of Serraf’s tapestries will be exhibited on the African continent.

If we do not dream, we cannot rest precedes Serraf’s upcoming solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in September 2025. It follows his participation in Marvellous Realism—the first and largest exhibition of African photography in Asia—at Fotografiska Shanghai, and his 2023 residency at Gasworks in London.

Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

The sun dips but it has not set, 2024

Wool and cotton hand-sewn tapestry on canvas backing with dowels.

Work: 120 x 90 cm (47.2 x 35.4 in.)

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

If our paths cross a third time, 2024

Wool and cotton hand-sewn tapestry on canvas backing with dowels

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

For iron to float on mercury, it must first unlearn the certainty of drowning, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

Our shadows lengthen as they age, 2024

Wool and cotton hand-sewn tapestry on canvas backing with dowels

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery
Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

Do not look for it in the future, 2024

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

Unique

Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

What we gave to give it all we had, 2024

Wool and cotton hand-sewn tapestry on canvas backing with dowels

Work: 120 x 90 cm (47.2 x 35.4 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

Longing for the rains, 2024

Wool and cotton hand-sewn tapestry on canvas backing stretched over wooden frame.

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

The blind light delivered us a message, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 120 x 90 cm (47.2 x 35.4 in.)

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

 

 

Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

The light appeared to reveal our shadows, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 90 x 160 cm (35.4 x 63 in.)

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

In some other lake, in some other time, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 90 x 160 cm (35.4 x 63 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

There has been no time for a while, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 90 x 160 cm (35.4 x 63 in.)

Unique

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Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

Whatever the needle, this place is your haystack, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 90 x 160 cm (35.4 x 63 in.)

Unique

Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery
Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf

These Monuments are fragments of dreams of home, 2025

Wool and cotton needlepoint tapestry

Work: 110 x 90 cm (43.3 x 35.4 in.)

Frame: 113 x 92.5 x 4 cm (44.5 x 36.4 x 1.6 in.)

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Micha Serraf’s tapestries emerge from his sculptural and drawing practices. His clay sculptures are created in complete darkness, using blackout curtains to eliminate light. Guided by intention and a sense of ancestral or spiritual form, darkness becomes a critical element in his process—rooted in his experiences growing up in Zimbabwe and later moving to South Africa, both countries shaped by persistent power supply challenges. For Serraf, working in the dark symbolises resilience and adaptation in the face of difficult circumstances.

He builds his figurative sculptures from the base upwards, allowing his eyes to slowly adjust to the limited light. This process results in bases that are rough and indistinct, gradually transitioning into more refined, recognisable forms toward the shoulders and head. The sketches of these sculptures are then incorporated into tapestry works, placed within landscapes drawn from memory, nostalgia, and imagination—depicting figures navigating or contemplating their surroundings.

Serraf says, “The figures and forms in my work shift between worlds, their presence neither fixed nor fleeting but in constant negotiation with time. Through the lens of my own odyssey as a young boy, familial tales become maps that guide me through histories I have never lived but somehow remember. In recontextualising displacement, I reconstruct a world where the unfamiliar becomes a place of return. My work is an assertion of joy, abundance, and belonging—each tapestry a conversation between past and present, between what is remembered and what is waiting to be recalled.”

Micha Serraf | If we do not dream, we cannot rest -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Micha Serraf’s (b. 1994, Zimbabwe) practice is centred around rewriting the trauma of displacement with the imagined memory of celebration, homage and childlike wonder. In pursuit of memory, identity and a place to call home, his work is grounded in a nostalgia of personal and ancestral experience, caught in an entanglement between ancestral history and utopic optimism.


Serraf will have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in September 2025. Other notable career moments include his inclusion in the group exhibition “Marvellous Realism” at Fotografiska Shanghai in 2024; his Gasworks Artist Residency in 2023; selection as a Norval Sovereign African Art Prize finalist in 2023; Winner of the Ritzau Art Prize 2021; his ISCP New York Artist Residency in 2021; and his inclusion in the group exhibition “Foam Talent 2020” with works from a new generation of visual artists at the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam.