Cauleen Smith: Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted. 

Zeitz MOCAA presents Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted; a survey exhibition by African-American artist Cauleen Smith. Curated by Zeitz MOCAA Curator of Contemporary Art, Thato Mogotsi, the exhibition is on show from 20 November 2025 until 4 October 2026 on Level 3, Silo Side of the museum.

Based in Los Angeles (LA), Smith is a prolific and widely recognised filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across varying media. Her practice is notably experimental and non-linear. Smith has exhibited extensively in renowned art institutions globally and has received numerous grants and awards, including a Heinz Award and  Guggenheim Fellowship. Her films have been screened and collected internationally. In her first major presentation on the continent, sequential screens and expanded installations enwrap visitors in her world-building projects, where short films and videos interact spatially with drawings, sculpted objects, colourful banners and the sonic.

The exhibition opens with and takes its title from one of Smith’s many text-based banners, pointing to her use of heraldic and proclamatory language. Stylistically, the banner draws directly from American painter, sculptor and conceptual artist Paul Thek’s 1985 painting of the same title. In its original form, the borrowed phrase reads: “Comfort the Afflicted, Afflict the Comfortable.” It was coined by the writer and humourist Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), who used it satirically to comment on the role of the press in society.

Smith’s practice is characterised by her longstanding intellectual concern with Black cinema, Afrocentric aesthetics, Black feminism, science fiction and Third World Cinema. Smith’s mode of experimentation is investigative and draws from long existing, and yet rarely engaged archives and uncomfortable territories that merge with shared cultural iconographies. Across many of her films, there is a continuous enquiry into histories of Black gathering and retreat.

Featured in the exhibition are several key films in Smith’s expansive practice; including among others: A Woman Discusses Her Photograph (2008); Remote Viewing (2011), Pilgrim (2017) and Sojourner (2018). These feature the cultural and storied urban landscapes of LA, New Orleans, Texas and Chicago that root the journeys of important figures and collectives that Smith cites; paying homage to their contributions to liberatory traditions that continue to sustain Black life.

Through epic soundscapes, maximalist installations, the sensorial editing style of her films and a controlled use of light; Smith makes evident the enduring resonances of placemaking and world-building. In many ways, the exhibition environment invites viewers into an atmospheric enquiry, where a central question in Smith’s practice is posed; that is: what is possible when movement, gathering and the quest for Black utopias are centralised within political, social and collective imaginations?

By making use of a spatial pattern of layered references cited in Smith’s films, this survey exhibition foregrounds the artist’s research-driven approach. Through their pursuit of specific sites, figures and communities, emergent from the Black American context, the artist presents distinctly intertextual films challenging the viewer to think and look against the linear spectrum of narrative time – often expected of the medium of cinema. Rather, Smith’s films pursue seemingly unlikely markers of relation.

With a committed visual language that brings together her depth of interest in the emancipatory uses of the utopic, Smith’s Black visual practice is grounded in what she calls ‘…the everyday possibilities of the imagination.’

Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA. These bring into focus and contextualise the practices of important artists from Africa and its diaspora. In the spirit of radical solidarity, our programme continues to look beyond the continent’s borders, attending to new and old entanglements that implicate the world in Africa and Africa in the world.

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.