Summer 2023 exhibitions

Zeitz MOCAA announces two new exhibitions for summer, marking the start of an exceptionally busy season for the institution. The shows and their accompanying programming solidify Zeitz MOCAA’s vision and mission to maintain its position as a pan-African space and an active agent that caters to and nurtures society through art.

Mame-Diarra Niang: Self as a Forgotten Monument
November 17, 2023–July 7, 2024

Self as a Forgotten Monument is the first museum exhibition by Mame-Diarra Niang and is a survey of the artist’s practice from the past decade, bringing together significant bodies of work in dialogue in a spatial choreography. Niang’s prolific practice is characterised by an exploratory, abstract and subversive approach to lens-based media, such as photography and immersive audio-visual installation. Her work is an act of remembering, through which she resists categorisation and assumptions about geographies and specificities.

The title of the exhibition is an invitation for viewers to embrace the artist’s notion of “Plasticity of the Territory,” a concept that forms the foundation of her practice and asserts an inner territory that names life as an experience in and of itself. A monument in Niang’s world registers as a commemorative structure of remembrance, an offering to remind us of a never-ending metamorphosis of the self. It is an inner space odyssey to build a self-portrait in constant mutation.

This survey exhibition includes new iterations of Niang’s immersive room installations; they ground the artist’s sensibility and personal meaning-making embedded in her practice and are site-specific to Zeitz MOCAA, whilst retaining a lineage to the different spaces that the works have previously occupied. Since Time Is Distance in Space, a multiscreen filmic installation that envelops the viewer, also includes a nuanced musical score composed and recorded by Niang. 

Self as a Forgotten Monument forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of important artists from Africa and its diaspora.

Curators: Storm Janse van Rensburg and Thato Mogotsi

Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers
October 27, 2023–October 13, 2024

Exhibition vernissage: November 16, 2023, 6pm

Featuring the work of seven artists—Gladys Kalichini, Latedjou, Sekai Machache, Nyancho NwaNri, Pamina Sebastiāo, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Helena Uambembe—Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers explores thematic accounts and experiences connected to the non-physical world—spiritual, psychological, supernatural and abstract—by using the camera lens to expand, project and reflect on how historical narratives are carried through the body and passed on from generation to generation. The artists employ experimental film, immersive installation, performance, sound and narration to depict how ritual, devotion and acts of remembrance can bring restoration and alternative perspectives of the self within the cycle of life.

The number seven acts as an anchor throughout the exhibition, with seven artists symbolising the spiritual significance the numeral holds across various belief and cultural systems, from the past to the present. Seven has signified completion and perfection, has been a symbol of divine introspection and perception, and represents healing and fulfilment. There are seven phases of the moon and seven days in a week, each day named for a deity in the Greco-Roman tradition. The Abrahamic God is also said to have rested on the seventh day.

The exhibition title is inspired by the 2007 poem “Speaking in Tongues” by Jamaican author Kei Miller and forms a mantra for the constellation of works on display. The poem points to a human need to engage with worlds one cannot touch while emphasising the limits of language to fully describe the lived experience.

Curators: Beata America and Tandazani Dhlakama

Zeitz MOCAA’s curatorial and exhibition programming is generously supported by Gucci and the Mellon Foundation.