VIRTUAL TOURS
Current Exhibitions
Eclectica Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Margins, a group show which runs alongside three adjacent curatorial collaborations taking place in the gallery throughout August and September to celebrate Womxn’s Month. As a womxn run and led gallery based in South Africa, August is a focal month in Eclectica Contemporary’s calendar. Our intentions, as a gallery and as a team, have always been to provide a platform that highlights and celebrates the narratives of and from the African continent and so, by hosting a group exhibition in August each year, our focus turns towards womxn and sharing their stories. To turn to womxn in this time, to us, means turning towards conversations around the impact of gender, its definitions and the constraints which shape and reflect society at large.
As part of our Womxn’s Month program, Eclectica Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Ke Namile, a group show curated by one of our invited collaborators, LegakwanaLeo Makgekgenene. They have brought together 7 artists which include: Malwande Mthethwa, Shana-Lee Ziervogel, Elijah Ndoumbé, Lamb of Lemila, Ranji Mangcu and Rona to present a show which confronts gender binarism and exclusionary feminism.
Past Exhibitions
The Exhibition is called Kwaai, this year is its third installment as an annual Exhibition. It sets out to provide a platform on which ‘Coloured’/ POC artists and those who identify as such can exhibit together in a considered space. It also serves as a celebratory Exhibition of the multifaceted Coloured identity. As such, this exhibition has the responsibility to be more than just a static exhibition. We try to make it more accessible by taking Kwaai and all it embodies out into the community; in the past we held an event at Cedar High in Mitchells Plain and we donate a percentage of the sold works to an organisation doing active (creative) work in the POC community.
Since the beginning of 2020, or perhaps long before, the world has been in various states of flux, requiring a change of pace, a different dynamic and altered means of interaction. Thus, as we shift in tone to new possibilities, acknowledging the tensions and sounds of strain, and as the seasons are changing colours to different shades, this exhibition presents a play of form, shape, colour and tone. By gathering together works that engage with gentle and sometimes unexpected representations, the exhibition hopes to offer solace and a space for reconnecting, in spite of the precariousness that we have recently experienced of our worlds. The idea of tone as incremental, some- thing steady and gradual, resonates with our current experiences as we begin to assume new normals, slowly adjusting and shifting as our world as we knew it changes its tune.
Kupa’s latest body of work that follows up from his previous solo. Relearn, my soul is a culmination of a period of Kupa’s self-investigation that grappled with the importance of the three stages of life: birth, life and death. His explorations have taken him on a journey to find himself, and in the process he has produced these works, which offer an illustration of this.
A recurrent feature of Kupa’s works are densely populated crowd scenes. He explains that “I use crowds as a symbol of oneness, that everything is connected and all is one’. In this sense, Kupa invites a sense of community and shared experience, reflecting his personal intentional commitment towards relearning.
Throughout the exhibition, his aim is to convey and explore change, for both the arts and the subjects he depicts. The works reflect three stages: destructiveness, messiness, and fulfilment – where each image unfolds and rebuilds across the picture plan and throughout the exhibition.
Relearn, my soul emerges from a space of fulfilment. Kupa delved into destruction, experienced messiness and reappears resolved and affirmed – having unlearned to relearn.
Hussein Salim is no stranger to travel, finding new environments, adapting to new living spaces. Having traveling extensively since leaving Khartoum, Sudan in the 1980s, his experiences have layered his work with a dense patterning of memory, reminiscence of place and intricate symbolisms influenced by different cultural contexts.
A poem titled The Importance of Elsewhere by Philip Larkin inspired the title of this exhibition. As a practicing Sufi, engaged with meditative writing practices, Salim imbues each painting with poetry and a spiritual intent that can be felt, sensed or interpreted in various ways through the recurring motifs, range of colours and lyrical titles.
Salim asserts
“I paint for:
The recognition of the imaginative
The recognition of others
The recognition of the humane”