As Necessary as Bread – contemporary photographer Gabrielle Kannemeyer at EBONY/CURATED

EBONY/CURATED presents As Necessary as Bread, the debut solo exhibition by contemporary photographer Gabrielle Kannemeyer, opening on Wednesday, 17 September at their Loop Street gallery.

The exhibition engages with the layered histories of South African horse culture as a site where displacement, erasure and cultural continuity are continuously negotiated. In this body of work, Kannemeyer revists familial and community sites between valleys and suburbs such as Genadendal and Sandvlei, the show grounds around Cape Town, and the rural and suburban spaces where equestrian traditions endure. Through portraits and documentary images, she constructs a visual language that explores belonging, heritage, and the right to leisure in contemporary South Africa.

The exhibition title, As Necessary as Bread, is borrowed from historian Sandra Swart’s book Riding High, in which she cites Jan van Riebeeck’s 17th-century description of horses as being “as necessary as bread in our mouths”. Reframed here, the phrase highlights the entanglement of the horse in South Africa’s colonial project, where it served as both an instrument of conquest and class stratification and as a locus of resistance, dignity, and continuity for communities historically excluded from dominant equestrian narratives.

Kannemeyer presents portraits, candid images, and archival fragments that shift between staged collaboration and close observation. Families at show grounds, young riders in familiar valleys, and quiet moments of intimacy between humans and their animals recur throughout the exhibition, acting as meditations on cultural survival and presence. Horses appear as more than subjects: they emerge as signifiers through which power, tradition, and memory are inscribed. This approach, grounded in lived participation and personal history, allows even the most fleeting encounters to carry the weight of intergenerational memory.

Having first encountered horses through her father in Sandvlei, Somerset West, Genadendal and Greyton, Kannemeyer later entered equestrian spaces where riders from her background were largely absent. These formative experiences anchor her perspective: not as an outsider curious about culture, but as someone who belongs to and is shaped by it. In revisiting these spaces, she creates what she calls a counter-archive, one that unsettles class-coded traditions of equestrian imagery and reinscribes presence and complexity where erasure has prevailed. As Necessary as Bread insists that heritage is not a static inheritance but an active, embodied negotiation. Through this work, Kannemeyer offers both a personal and collective account of horse culture in South Africa, foregrounding the social and political stakes embedded in practices too often dismissed as mere leisure.

Gabrielle Kannemeyer (1989 – ) is a photographer and visual storyteller based in District Six, Cape Town. Her work is grounded in personal history, community connections and a deep engagement with heritage and place. With a background in fine art and a practice informed by years of visual exploration, Gabrielle’s photography focuses on emotionally resonant, often overlooked stories around equestrian traditions in South Africa

WHAT: As Necessary as Bread – solo exhibition by Gabrielle Kannemeyer 
WHERE: EBONY/CURATED, Loop Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Wednesday, 17 September 2025 at 6:00 PM
INFO: T +27 (0)21 424 9985 |E jade@ebonycurated.com | VISIT