Exhibitions & Upcoming Events at the AVA Gallery happening NOW – so please make a note of the 2 events this weekend tying in with the exciting range of exhibitions on view.
Walkabouts & Memory Workshop
- Saturday 26 July
10:00 – 11:30: Zine Making and Memory workshop with Thato Makatu. With limited space available, RSVP HERE to secure your spot. (See below: Tell me about a day you don’t remember.)
11:30 – 13:00: Walkabout of Nanna’s Kitchen by Aaron Philander followed by a walkabout of A Beast with Two Backs led by curators Grace Matetoa & Keely Shinners.
Tell me about a day you don’t remember – Alka Dass, Kirstie Pietersen, Nina Turok Shapiro, Sitaara Stodel, Thato Makatu and Zenaéca Singh
Curated by Aaliya Dramat, Aiden Nel, Erin Sweeney and Vida Madighi-Oghu
Mezzanine Gallery: 26.06.25 – 31.07.25
Nina Turok Shapiro, Familial Relation I, 2025
This exhibition explores the fragile, unreliable, and deeply romanticised nature of personal and collective memory. Memory does not function as a perfect archive, instead, it erases, distorts, and sometimes fabricates, shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Tell me about a day you don’t remember asks artists and viewers alike to consider how the act of remembering is shaped by forgetting.
Nanna’s Kitchen – Aaron Philander
Long Gallery: 26.06.25 – 31.07.25
“The exhibition is titled Nanna’s Kitchen because it evokes the heart of where my understanding of colouredness was nurtured through the everyday warmth, chaos, and richness of life in coloured households. My nanna’s home, like many others I grew up in, was a place of sensory memory: the smell of cooking, the singing that filled the rooms, the layered voices of family gathering, the laughter and the worn-down furniture. These spaces, though weathered, held a beauty rooted in community, resilience, and love. Nanna’s Kitchen brings that sense of home into the gallery, grounding my work in the memory of those lived experiences and honouring the textured, complex identity I carry forward.” See LEAD PHOTO: Thato Makatu, notes on building a kitchen – exercise sheet #1 and instructions, 2025)
A BEAST WITH TWO BACKS Group show curated by Grace Matetoa and Keely Shinners
Main Gallery: 26.06.25 – 31.07.25
Callan Grecia, The Intersector, 2025
This group exhibition is grounded by a shared fascination with artist couples––couples who happen to be artists, or artists in relationship. Couples who find themselves in relationship because of a shared passion for art, couples who encourage and inspire each other to make, couples whose respective practices are marked by a sense of collaboration, consciously or unconsciously.
Reflections of a Queen – Kganya Mogashoa
Front Gallery: 26.06.25 – 31.07.25
Kganya Mogashoa, Reflections of a queen (Rosa Parks), 2025
Reflections of a Queen is both a celebration and an act of resistance. Through each portrait, the artist reclaims cultural space, embedding history back into public consciousness through visual language. Mogashoa addresses the daily injustices faced by women – gender-based violence, economic exclusion and social invisibility – and transformes them into layered works of reverence and protest.
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support by the City of Cape Town
WHAT: Exhibitions & Upcoming Events at the AVA Gallery
WHERE: Association for Visual Art (AVA) Gallery, 35 Church Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Saturday 26 July 2025. Exhibitions end 31 Luly 2025
INFO: T 021 424 7436 | E admin@ava.co.za | VISIT
LEAD PHOTO: Thato Makatu, notes on building a kitchen – exercise sheet #1 and instructions, 2025
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