Margot Dower’s ArtThrob review of Georgina Maxim’s Telling Moments at Goodman Gallery, London, focused on six works assembled from clothing and embroidery. The Zimbabwe-based artist’s use of dhunge mutunge, a temporary stitching technique, became a way to consider memory, women’s lives and the limits of repair. Dower resisted flattening the work into a general textile-art trend, stressing the specificity of its methods and context.
Zeitz MOCAA’s July 2024 announcement introduced Berni Searle as the sixth resident in its Atelier programme. Under the title On Site, the Cape Town artist combined earlier work, moving images, sketches and objects with a working studio where new ideas could develop. The museum connected the residency to Searle’s sustained engagement with the city’s histories and to opportunities for visitors to encounter artistic processes directly.
Tiyani Rikhotso reviewed Lady Skollie’s GROOT GAT at Norval Foundation for ArtThrob, following its final presentation associated with her 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist Award. The paintings drew on San and Khoisan rock art while exploring gaps left by colonial dispossession. Rikhotso described the exhibition’s reimagined cave realm and its tribute to Botswana artist Coex’ae Qgam as acts of self-authored cultural memory.
Zeitz MOCAA announced its first children’s book series, The Stories that Ran Away, in July 2024. Written by Meridian Berndt and illustrated by Jax Lamb, Berndt, Jill Joubert and Mandy Wamono, the four books grew from the museum’s earlier child-centred exhibition. The museum described the project as a way to connect African creation stories, visual art and learning, extending its educational work beyond the galleries.
In May 2024, Zeitz MOCAA reported that its fellowship with the University of the Western Cape had welcomed Yasmina Ali Yahia, Angela Muritu, Edna Bettencourt, Kakule Chadrack and Abbey IT-A. The third cohort combined museum work with study toward an honours qualification. The announcement records a pan-African investment in curatorial practice, collections, education and heritage, with fellows contributing to the museum’s Atelier programme.
In April 2024, Zeitz MOCAA announced a new Selections from the Collection presentation in Cape Town. Drawing on contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, the exhibition addresses migration, memory, visibility, desire and power through multiple media. Featured artists include Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Kudzanai Chiurai and Joël Andrianomearisoa. The museum’s announcement scheduled the display from 4 April 2024 until 4 April 2027.
In December 2023, Zeitz MOCAA announced Sala, a collection exhibition developed with its museum fellows and staff from across departments. Seventeen artists, including El Anatsui, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Thania Petersen and Zanele Muholi, provided different ways to consider what a museum holds and whom it serves. The announcement framed the title as an invitation to remain in conversation with the works, the institution and its audiences.
In November 2023, Zeitz MOCAA announced two exhibitions examining memory, identity and the possibilities of lens-based media. Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers brought together seven artists working with film, performance and installation to explore spirituality and inherited histories. Mame-Diarra Niang’s Self as a Forgotten Monument surveyed a decade of photographic and audiovisual work, including an immersive installation. Both were presented as part of the Cape Town museum’s programme.
In July 2023, Zeitz MOCAA announced two exhibitions examining cultural solidarity and political struggle: Past Disquiet and Seismography of Struggle. The former included research on art opposing apartheid; the latter assembled journals associated with liberation movements across Africa, Asia and the Americas. A symposium and the publication Radical Solidarity: A Reader accompanied the programme, extending conversations begun during the museum’s online gathering in 2020.
ART AFRICA reported on Otherscapes at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, bringing large installations by Nicholas Hlobo, Sethembile Msezane, Siemon Allen and Wim Botha into dialogue. The works approached belonging and national identity through spatial environments visitors could move around or through. Rather than illustrating a political verdict, the exhibition asked how memory, spirituality and colonial histories complicate the distance between democratic aspiration and contemporary disappointment.
ART AFRICA covered Phoka Nyokong’s Museum of New Hymns for the Confused at Johannesburg’s Absa Gallery. Paintings developed during a 2022 NIROX residency continued the artist’s investigation of African cultural heritage and its violent entanglements with anthropology, religion and museum classification. The presentation followed his Gerard Sekoto award, offering an example of how residency and award support translated into a sustained critical body of visual work.
Zeitz MOCAA’s November 2022 announcement outlined When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, bringing nearly 200 works by 154 artists into dialogue. Curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama, the Cape Town exhibition approached Black self-representation through themes including everyday life, joy, spirituality and emancipation. A publication and discussion programme accompanied the exhibition, which was scheduled to open on 20 November 2022.
ART AFRICA reported that Zeitz MOCAA’s Indigo Waves and Other Stories would open on 30 June 2022, examining the Indian Ocean’s role in connecting African and Asian histories. Curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with Michelangelo Corsaro, the exhibition included commissions involving Thania Petersen, Myriam Omar Awadi and Shiraz Bayjoo. Its historical focus encompassed migration, colonial trade and cultural exchange, extending accounts of diaspora beyond the Atlantic.
Zeitz MOCAA’s February 2022 programme paired Tracey Rose’s retrospective Shooting Down Babylon with Goldendean’s inflatable installation Soft Vxnxs. The museum described Rose’s work as a complex engagement with contemporary political and social questions. Goldendean invited visitors to touch the sculpture, using physical presence and participation to explore visibility, embodiment and the entitlement to occupy space. The announcement scheduled the exhibitions to open three days apart.
Zeitz MOCAA’s January 2022 release announced Shooting Down Babylon, a large retrospective of South African artist Tracey Rose. The museum described a presentation spanning three decades and bringing together performance, film, installation and other media to examine liberation, colonial legacies and the body. It also announced new Mandela Balls commissions, positioning Rose’s confrontational and often satirical practice within a broader discussion of resistance and reckoning.
Zeitz MOCAA’s 2021 announcement introduced Only Sun in the Sky Knows How I Feel, a survey of Johannes Phokela’s painting spanning three decades. Alongside earlier work, the exhibition included new large canvases and archival material illuminating his process. The museum framed his engagement with European pictorial traditions as a means of questioning power and inherited value systems. Koyo Kouoh and Storm Janse van Rensburg co-curated the presentation.
Anya Brilus’s ArtThrob review examines how Georgina Gratrix’s exhibition The Reunion at Norval Foundation expands portraiture beyond physical likeness. The Durban-raised artist’s layered paintings of her parents are set against Nine Weeks, a sequence of daily watercolour self-portraits made during South Africa’s 2020 lockdown. Brilus interprets the contrasting materials and repeated faces as records of relationships, memory and changing emotional experience.
Zeitz MOCAA announced Thania Petersen’s KASSARAM as an open-studio residency running from 27 May to 17 October 2021. Centred on her film of the same name, the project examined how representations of culture can create divisions and obscure community histories. The Cape Town artist planned to develop the film’s imagined setting within the museum, giving visitors access to research and making connected to her heritage and identity.
Writing for ArtThrob, Francia Pratt considers how a pairing at Zeitz MOCAA connects memory with domestic life and material form. Her review brings Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s mixed-media painting Sunday Morning into conversation with Joël Andrianomearisoa’s fabric work. Pratt reads the photographic fragments and textile surfaces as different ways of holding personal histories, absence and bodily experience, showing how the exhibition’s paired presentation creates connections across distinct artistic practices.
Zeitz MOCAA announced Senzeni Marasela’s first museum solo exhibition for December 2020. Waiting for Gebane centred on Theodorah, an alter ego inspired by the artist’s mother, whose search for an absent husband unfolds through photographs, textiles and performance. The presentation connected this narrative with Marasela’s sustained use of ishweshwe dresses, examining memory, waiting and the experiences of Black women in South Africa.