South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Life

Outside the fair's stage, South African and international artists set the agenda

Thero Makepe, Sello, 2021. Courtesy of Lemkus Gallery.

5 Mar 2025

Art week in Cape Town: Champagne flutes and air-kisses, collector’s lunches, dealer’s dinners, artist talks, walkabouts, openings and launches.

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair itself may be the drawcard, but it’s the emergent and exciting artistic ecosystem surrounding the fair that’s worth paying attention to.

Over a few days in the city, this writer went in search of the off-programme shows and events, rediscovering a city full of engaged makers and thinkers, and tugging on a few key threads.

Material traces

Almost everything during art week takes place within a 5km radius. The furthest I travelled from my hotel room in the city centre was out to sleepy Tokai for the opening of Billy Zangewa’s solo exhibition at Norval Foundation – a rare opportunity to see more than a handful of Zangewa’s works together in a single room.

For the most part, I was in and around the city centre, moving between galleries, coffee shops and project spaces.

Ahead of the fair’s opening night, I took a walk up Church Street, stopping in at SMAC gallery to see the new Wallen Mapondera show.

Wallen Mapondera installation. (Photograph: courtesy of SMAC Gallery)

Titled Kura Uone – a Shona phrase that translates to “mature and then see” – Mapondera’s latest body of work is a welcome moment of quiet materiality.

Mapondera works with paper, card, fabric, wire and thread to carefully build up and then cut, tear and rupture the surfaces of his works. By allowing himself to sit and work with this simple list of materials at length, the artist evokes numerous forms, and subsequently various interpretations.

The works adorning the walls of SMAC look like dried-out wasp nests, swirling vortexes and sweeping landscapes. There is great yearning in some, playful portraiture in others. Always, there is the call for a deep intentionality – an invitation to approach these rich fields of abstraction and find meaning in affect.

On 52 Waterkant Street is THK Gallery which occupies three floors. A few artists are on show, but it’s paper that stands out again. Mille Kalsmose’s Collected Memory is a striking sculptural work made from Brass, and Chinese and Japanese double-woven paper stained with tea.

Mille Kalsmose, Collected Memory, 2025. (Photograph: Courtesy of THK Gallery).

The paper, pressed between clean lines of brass, almost bleeds with sentiment – sepia-tinted memories leaking from the page. The work’s twin, also Collected Memory, was at the fair, its loaded pages stained a deep and dreamy blue.

Up on the 7th floor of Bree Castle House is RESERVOIR, a gallery with romantic views of the city, and a penchant for clean, conceptual work.

They’re just adding the final touches to Bella Knemeyer’s solo exhibition, Here, there and everywhere, when I arrive. A background in architecture and urban studies informs much of Knemeyer’s work. She’s known for her work with mulched paper, imbued in this exhibition with rich pigment, and embellished with methodical striations, rivulets and ruptures.

Installation view of Bella Knemeyer's Here, there and everywhere, RESERVOIR gallery.

Here, the detritus of the city – old manuals, newsprint, old cable, wire, and concrete fragments – is collective provenance, and a subtle reflection on a place that continues to quietly, furtively dismantle and rebuild, sometimes productively, often reprehensibly.

For Knemeyer, whose previous research has seen her tracing the journey of rubble (such as the physical remains of District Six) throughout the city, there is an attention to both states of disrepair and restoration. Importantly, her work gestures towards the material weight of human-made detritus, too.

In ‘Spalling together’ a thin sliver of cast mesh begins to surface from beneath the layers of mulched paper. It’s an exquisite moment – at once a scratching at the surface of a city’s history, and a dive into the deep time of the earth’s geology. It’s an engagement with material and the interests it holds that, as the exhibition title tells us, takes us everywhere all at once.

A DIY spirit

What about the work on the fringes, the project spaces and impromptu shows running alongside, counter to, in conversation with the fair and the city?

Ahead of the fair, artists Alka Dass and Kamyar Bineshtarigh cleared out their Saltriver studio to make space for Misfits, an earnest group show “for those who make regardless”.

Installation view of Misfits at the Saltriver studio of Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Alka Dass. (Photograph: courtesy of the artists).

Work by more than 40 artists was on exhibition and up for sale. While some of the artists, Dass and Bineshtarigh included, had work on at the fair, many were either not represented outside of this group exhibition, or were without institutional representation (which is really the main way to ensure you have work at a South African art fair).

But the title moves beyond this practical interpretation. The work on show at Misfits is also playful, odd, striking and wonderfully self-assured. Highlights include Aaron Philander’s cutting knife made to look as if it’s lodged in the back of a canvas, or Luca Evans’ intrepid CitiGolf in wood (without side mirrors).

A black rubbish bag in the entranceway bears the exhibition’s title, but it’s the studio bin around the corner – an accidental artwork – filled with empty takeaway coffee cups and Red Bull cans, that seems to capture the essence of art week in Cape Town.

I never made it to Jared Ginsburg’s pop-up exhibition in the second-floor Gardens apartment of Marc Barben, but friends helped fill me in. Curated by Barben, the exhibition features paintings, drawings and sculptures, all of them showcasing Ginsburg’s playful, intuitive way with mark-making. His lock-up canvases, decorated with drawings and paintings of limbs, sketches and schematics, have the ability to fold in on themselves, and shut like school lockers.

With works being switched up and swapped out each day, visitors to the exhibition can never be sure which composition they’ll be seeing.

Accompanying these, a series of soft sculptures – string, wire, wood – installed like rough sketches against the wall. It’s worth noting that Ginsburg’s lock-up works also made it to the fair, but there’s something about an untitled apartment exhibition that’s so much more fun.

Photographic engagements

“Sabelo’s show at Blank,” was the answer most people gave me when I asked what else I should see in and around town. The photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni, had opened his solo exhibition, Honeymoon. The happily ever after? a few weeks earlier.

Sabelo Mlangeni, Honeymoon. The happily ever after (2025), Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town. (Photograph: Supplied)

Sabelo Mlangeni, Honeymoon. The happily ever after (2025). Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town. (Photograph: Supplied)

Blank can be a difficult space to fill, but Mlangeni has five years’ worth of images made in eThekwini and they come alive in the space like a symphony.

The images of grinning men and women on the beachfront stand out, as do the close-up and almost abstract frames of musclebound body builders. But the quieter images, strategically placed in the corners, on the fringes of the exhibition, are just as engaging.

Here, the full spectrum of South Africa’s third-largest city is on exhibition, replete with abundance and disrepair, golden coastlines and deteriorating buildings. Mlangeni’s eye, through the lens and the editing suite, is keen and precise – trained at once on the sweeping composition of an apartment building, and a single white curtain billowing out an open window.

The exhibition is both a loud, loving portrait of a seaside city and an unobtrusive study in the aftereffects of political and environmental instability.

A narrow elevator in the sneaker store on 28 St Georges Mall takes you up to the fifth floor of Lemkus Gallery where Thero Makepe’s We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here is on exhibition. A project between Oeuvre Projects and Lemkus Gallery, and curated by Lemkus’ Jared Leite, Makepe’s solo is easily one of the highlights of the week.

Thero Makepe, Kereke, 2019. (Photograph: Courtesy of Lemkus Gallery).

Thero Makepe, Under Surveillance, 2021. (Photograph: Courtesy of Lemkus Gallery).

Thero Makepe, Sello, 2021. (Photograph: Courtesy of Lemkus Gallery).

Growing up in Gaborone, Botswana, Makepe’s family tree is made up of jazz giants, anti-apartheid activists and many individuals on the move as a result of political exile.

Much of this history forms part of an ongoing project for Makepe, which has seen him produce photobooks and photographic series alike. The images in We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here continue Makepe’s research into his family history and, in turn, the history of black struggle and liberation across southern Africa.

There are portraits of family members, religious ceremonies and iconography, and a subtle, almost casual focus on architectural styles. Images are made on Robben Island, Gaborone, inside churches and private homes. But it’s Makepe’s attention to light, his veneration of its presence in the frame, that unifies and elevates this body of work.

This might seem obvious, given the medium of photography, but whether it’s the use of natural or artificial light – tinted rays filtering through a church window or the whitewash glow of a cellphone flashlight at night, for example – Makepe folds light into each frame in a way that allows it to become a character or a force of its own.

In almost all instances, though, its greatest effect is atmospheric – light’s ability to activate and hold yearning, grief, reverence and other fugitive emotions, in a single moment or gesture.

What to take from these brief vignettes, this sweeping account of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and the constellations of exhibitions and pop-up galleries that surround it?

For one, Cape Town’s art ecosystem seems to be alive and active on all fronts – from the dealerships and project spaces, to the auction houses, museums and artist studios.

Art fairs’ attempts to “activate the city” very rarely work. The Investec Cape Town Art Fair, however, seems to be in touch with the art scene in a way that allows for this necessary porousness between the art fair and public programming, informal or not.

Or perhaps it’s the work of a community of artists and institutions who know how to pull together strategically, playfully, when it counts. Whatever the case, it’s working. DM

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South Africa

Material traces

A DIY spirit

Photographic engagements