The AVA Gallery Current Exhibition Programme provides us with 4 compelling reasons to visit this diverse range of artwork running untlll16 April 2025.
- Watching the Sky Fall – Dale Washkansky
- A Collection to a Degree – Jean-Claude Nsabimana | Rory Emmett | Nobukho Nqaba | Ulriche Jantjes
- The SADC* Biennale Hypothesised by Raul Jorge Gourgel + Rory Tsapayi
- Keiskamma Artists in Profile Group show | Curated by Michaela Howse and Cebo Mvubu
Watching the Sky Fall Dale Washkansky
Front Gallery
Dale’s Washkansky’s exhibition, Watching the Sky Fall (2025), is an inquiry into the visualisation of Gaza by platforms such as Google Maps and news media to explore how we can access this space in spite of the mediation of the screen.
Google Maps’ street view, despite mapping most of the world, has not mapped Gaza.
From the perspective of an outsider using this online platform, one is therefore presented with a space set apart and isolated from the rest of the world.
Washkansky layers Polaroid images of the sky above Gaza taken from Google Maps with Polaroids taken from found documentary images, which are then transferred onto glass.[Photo above]
The artist notes his intention is not merely to represent what has been happening in Gaza, but to present it for the viewer, whereby each viewer senses the urgency and emergency of what has been happening and is obliged to respond in their own ways.
Dale Washkansky, #41, 2025 Dale Washkansky, #10, 2025
A Collection to a Degree – Jean-Claude Nsabimana | Rory Emmett | Nobukho Nqaba | Ulriche Jantjes
Nobukho Nqaba
A Collection to a Degree’ is a group presentation by Jean-Claude Nsabimana, Rory Emmett, Nobukho Nqaba and Ulriche Jantjes.
The exhibition features a selection of work submitted as part of their individual Masters in Fine Art degrees completed in 2022 and 2023. Thematically, the artists explore ideas of identity, home, migration, and marginalised histories. This group exhibition showcases their personal reflections in a range of media including video works, photography, mixed media paintings and
installation.
Ulriche’s mixed media paintings in lime wash, straw, and ink on canvas are large scale and tactile. These works, alongside Rory’s video and installation, featuring a cabinet filled with abstracted Delft crockery and reclaimed trade-painter’s Hessian drop sheets, comment on their personal history and identity. In conversation with these works,
Nobukho’s photographs and installation of blue overalls reflect on her childhood memories growing up in a marginalised community in Grabouw, a town located in the
Elgin Valley in the Western Cape. Jean-Claude’s work comments on migration and the socio-political climate exploring the extraction and exploitation of Africa’s mineral resources, its impact on the environment and lives on the continent. This exhibition contextualises contemporary issues by reflecting on our personal histories, cultural
heritage and lived experiences.
The SADC* Biennale Hypothesised by Raul Jorge Gourgel + Rory Tsapayi
Long Gallery: 08.03.25 – 16.04.25
“The SA*DC Biennale is a hypothetical fiction, a satirical misconception, and a subversive provocation. Both a parody of and a good-faith engagement with the defining structures of the biennial form and our regional bloc of nation-states, the S*ADC Biennale is a conceptual, anti-establishment, and experimental retort.”
Raul Jorge Gourgel and Rory Tsapayi invited individual cultural workers and creative collectives to ‘represent’ eleven different countries with ‘national pavilions’ that, by design, unsettle nationalistic ideologies, arbitrary borders, and the logic of the state.
These are housed in the SAD*C Giardini, a diorama of the imagined exhibition complex that hosts the Biennale*. Each pavilion hosts an exhibition of its own, curated under the theme of Towards a Common Relic. Present at this first edition of the Biennale* are: Angola, Botswana, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Keiskamma Artists in Profile Group show | Curated by Michaela Howse and Cebo Mvubu
Mezzaine Gallery
Nomonde Mthandana (detail)
Artists: Nomonde Mthandana, Nombulelo (Kwandi) Paliso, Cebo Mvubu, Lindiswa Gedze, Olwethu Nkani, Zukiswa Zita, Nolusindiso Jakavula, Nosiphiwo Mangwane, Sinoxolo Zita, Nombulelo Jack, Siyabonga Maswana, Ncomeka Gedze and Nokuzola Mvaphantsi. Curated by Michaela Howse and Cebo Mvubu.
This exhibition, marking twenty five years since Keiskamma Art Project’s inception, gives voice to individual artists within the well-known collective. It is the start of a move to nurture and profile artists who are developing their own voices within the context of the communal project. Within the moving currents of Ubuntu, strong individuals are still needed to lead, because if we are who we are through each other, uniqueness begets uniqueness. Expressions of integrity, beauty and rich inner worlds start the conversation collectively of what these could mean for each of us.
And across the road is The Cape Gallery Summer Review Group Exhibition
WHAT: AVA Gallery Programme – 4 Exhibitions
WHERE: AVA Gallery, 36 Church Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Until 16 April 2025
INFO: T 021 424 7438 | E admin@ava.co.za | VISIT
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