Join Eclectica Contemporary at FNB Art Joburg for a curatorial exploration of belonging, identity and the boundaries we construct between one another. Featuring artists including Johannes Phokela, Ayanda Mabulu and Thando Phenyane, the exhibition brings together dynamic practices that contribute to a layered dialogue around identity, connection and belonging.
Presented as part of the Cape Town Photography Festival, Palingenesis marks Justin Dingwall’s return to the butterfly, a defining symbol of his early practice. Revisiting the motif through a new lens, the exhibition explores transformation, identity, memory and renewal, bringing earlier works into dialogue with a new body of photographs that reflects the many selves we inhabit and the skins we shed across a lifetime.
Presented as part of the Cape Town Photography Festival, Between Truth and Fiction marks a significant new chapter in Hasan Essop’s practice. Through photography, performance and collage, Essop explores the construction of reality and identity, multiplying a single figure into a congregation of characters and possibilities. Drawing on questions of faith, belonging, migration and difference, the works occupy an uncertain space between theatre, documentary, memory and fiction.
Presented as part of HEAT Festival, Lars Fischedick's solo exhibition Controlled Rupture explores the dynamic relationship between precision and disruption. Through carved timber, resin, and metal, the exhibition reveals the hidden forces within material, where geometry, texture, and transformation converge in powerful sculptural works.
Presented as part of HEAT Festival, Jasirah Sayed's solo exhibition explores memory, identity, and cultural inheritance through suspended tapestries, sculptural canvases, and layered collage panels. Drawing on the symbolic language of the Persian garden, the exhibition invites viewers into contemplative spaces where personal and collective histories unfold through material, memory, and transformation.
Between Memory and Migration brings together the works of Hussein Salim and Mimouni El Houssaïne in an exploration of identity, memory, and belonging. Through layered symbols, calligraphic gestures, and poetic abstraction, both artists reflect on migration as a journey through space, memory, and imagination, transforming personal histories into universal narratives of displacement, longing, and return.
After the First Look revisits a selection of portraits beyond their first encounter, asking how perception shifts over time. Removed from the contexts that first shaped their reception, these works invite a slower, more critical form of looking, one that unsettles assumptions around identity, value, and visibility. Moving between presence and surface, recognition and doubt, the exhibition reflects on how meaning is never fixed, and how what we see changes as we do.
In the paintings of Ebenezer Samuel Akinola, movement becomes ritual. His figures traverse imagined ceremonial spaces with the solemnity of a procession, suspended between the contemporary and the ancestral, the intimate and the mythic. Constructed through carefully staged performances and translated into paint with remarkable technical precision, Akinola’s works combine cinematic storytelling, spiritual symbolism, and collective presence. Through flowing drapery, ambiguous narratives, and contemporary mythologies, the artist transforms the modern body into a vessel of memory, ritual, and passage.
Reframing Visibility brings together women artists whose practices explore presence, perception, and the conditions through which women are seen and interpreted. Across painting, sculpture, and experimental forms, the exhibition considers visibility not as a fixed state, but as a complex and contested field shaped by social expectation, resistance, and self-definition.
Not All Lives Are Legible looks back on three exhibitions, Lost Souls, The Repenters, and Darkness Rising, reflecting on how each engaged with the construction of the “other” within political and cultural systems. Moving from absence to misinterpretation to self-definition, Director Shamiela Tyer revisits questions of visibility, representation, and narrative control that remain deeply relevant today.
