A Protea Is Not a Flower, opening on Thursday 16 October at Zeitz MOCAA, is a powerful exhibition that brings together contemporary artists Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode in dialogue with the lives and works of painter Gerard Sekoto and writers Bessie Head and Don Mattera.
Curated by Zeitz MOCAA’s Khanyi Mawhayi, the exhibition runs until 15 November 2026 on Level 4 Silo Side of the museum.
A Protea Is Not a Flower is a multigenerational conversation between South African artists and writers whose lives and works contend with the complexity of the exilic experience. Contemporary visual artists Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode respond to the lives and works of painter Gerard Sekoto and writers Bessie Head and Don Mattera, three important figures of the Black Modernist Intellectual Movement in twentieth-century South Africa.
Exploring exile as both displacement and isolation, the exhibition draws inspiration from Don Mattera’s poem Protea…. Just as the protea survives under the harshest conditions, the works reflect on resilience, belonging, and creativity across generations and geographies.
Lerato Shadi is a South African artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Working across performance, video, and installation, Shadi interrogates assumed colonial narratives and critiques practices of historical erasure as mechanisms of violence against marginalised peoples. She challenges the politics of representing Black womanhood, centring her lived experience by using her body in repetitive interventions.
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- Lerato Shadi
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- Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Taking inspiration equally from youth street culture and art history, Rhode’s artistic practice treats the city wall as an expanded canvas, employing painting, performance, and photography. Rhode is sensitive to the social and political conditions of Black artists under apartheid and in the contemporary landscape.
A Protea Is Not a Flower stages this important and visually immersive intergenerational conversation wherein the foreign communes with the familiar, asking: what happens when we allow ourselves to look Beyond the Gate (1946-47), beyond borders, and beyond the national identities inherited from coloniality?
WHAT: A Protea Is Not a Flower
WHERE: Zeitz MOCAA, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: 6 October 25 – 15 November 2026 |Â 10:00 AM – 18:00 PM
INFO: VISITÂ |Â More info about A Protea Is Not a Flower can be found HERE
PHOTOS: L Shadi: Select Image, courtesy of Zeitz MOCAA.|Â R Rhode: Tilman Vogler, courtesy of the artist.
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