AVA Gallery invites you to 4 new exhibition opening on Thursday 30 April from 5pm – 8pm, with guided walkabout on Saturday 2 May at 11:00. LOTS to look forward to at the Association of Visual Arts!
Front Gallery: To Whom It May Concern A solo exhibition by Lebogang Mbewe
To Whom It May Concern is an intimate letter stitched into public space — a call, a confrontation, and a gesture toward repair. The phrase, often used when the recipient is unknown or withheld, becomes a site of tension: a letter addressed to systems, histories, ancestors, and futures that may or may not respond. The exhibition unfolds as an epistolary landscape in which tapestries operate as textile-based letters and surfaces that hold memory, fracture, and repair.
For a deeper dive into Mbewe’s exhibition, join AVA for a walkabout with the artist this Saturday, 2 May, from 11 am. See info below. [Photo above: Lebogang Mbewe, Uzung’ a wothi, uyashisa ungawu lokothi, 2025 (detail)]
Long Gallery: Broken telephone A collaborative exhibition by Luca Evans & thato makatu Â
L thato makatu, Snooze, 2026Â R Luca Evans, Grief Makes Things Small, 2026
In Broken telephone, Luca Evans and thato makatu engage in a collaborative exchange of works made in response to one another—a creative back-and-forth of ideas, prototypes, and artworks.
By printing, stitching, taping, stapling, and gluing materials together, the works offer a glimpse into the ongoing conversations the artists have had with their individual practices, their materials, and each other
Main Gallery: Articulated seams by Carola Friess & Kerry Lee Chambers
L Kerry Lee Chambers, Umbilicus (weight of my head), 2024 (detail)Â R Carola Friess, Vain Struggle, 2021 – 2025 (detail)
Syntactically speaking, seams are the simplest of conjunctions, holding two or more parts in relation: this and that provisionally arranged, pressed into proximity. An offcut of wire and discarded wax. Sculptures and works on paper.
Carola Friess and Kerry Lee Chambers approach their thematic enquiries with a tactile materiality and intuitive engagement with the grammar of otherwise overlooked things, from found objects to studio flotsam – things ‘jettisoned’ in Friess’s words, or ‘fallen’ in Chambers’s. Both artists are attentive to moments of contact between unlike parts, to the seams of touch that exist between one thing and another, and the interdependency of difference such encounters might suggest.
Mezzanine Gallery: Making My Way A solo exhibition by Pia Truscott
Pia Truscott, Echo, 2026
In this solo exhibition, Pia Truscott presents a series of wire arrangements, or “drawings,” entangled with everyday objects. In the same way a pencil moves across a page, suspended wires and ribbons trace pathways like contour lines, intuitively, building up line, colour and form. Every day materials take on new value and sentimentality. She considers these works to be an imagined place — a tumbled record of her daily environment where landscapes are intertwined with domestic fragments, tracing the contours of a personal geography and tentatively finding a way forward.
Artist-led Walkabout Saturday 2 May | 11 am – 1 pm
Join AVA this Saturday 2 May for a special artist-led walkabout of Lebogang Mbewe’s exhibition, To Whom It May Concern.
Born and raised in the East Rand of Johannesburg, Lebogang Mbewe, artistically known as Budd, is an architect, artist and interdisciplinary design practitioner whose work moves fluidly between visual art, research, and design activism. Her practice exists at the intersection of memory, identity, and spatial politics.
Her recent body of work presents textile-based correspondences addressed to land, ancestors, systems, and futures — each piece functioning as both an intimate offering and public provocation.
“We look forward to welcoming you” – Olga Speakes, Director of the AVA Gallery.Â
WHAT: 4 New Exhibitions
WHERE: Association for Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery, 35 Church St, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: opening 29 April 2026
INFO: T 021 424 7438 | E admin@ava.co.za | VISIT
LEAD PHOTO: Lebogang Mbewe, Uzung’ a wothi, uyashisa ungawu lokothi, 2025 (detail)
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