THK Gallery Presents The File Cannot Be Restored, an exhibititon featuring Nicola Brandt, Sahlah Davids and Tshepiso Moropa opening on 6 August 2026 as part of the HEAT Festival.
Positioned within HEAT Festival’s theme, Ctrl + Z, The File Cannot Be Restored borrows the language of digital failure topose a question: what if the past cannot be undone, not because it is fixed, but because it continues to live within the present?
The exhibition brings together the work of Nicola Brandt, Sahlah Davids and Tshepiso Moropa to examine how memory persists across landscapes, archives, inherited traditions, and everyday acts of making.
Working across photography, collage, and textile assemblage, the artists approach history as a contested and continually unfolding terrain. Nicola Brandt‘s practice critically engages with the entangled legacies of German colonialism, National Socialism, and Apartheid, examining how power is inscribed within landscapes and the intersections of private and public memory. Through her photographs, she draws attention not only to what history reveals, but also to what remains absent or deliberately obscured.
Nicola Brandt,
Sahlah Davids turns to textiles, upholstery, and needlework to explore the oral histories of her Cape Muslim heritage and thelasting social realities of apartheid. Drawing upon the domestic labour and artisanal traditions passed through generations of women in her family, her material language transforms beads, pins, fabric, and upholstery foam into vessels of memory.
Sahlah Davids
These familiar materials speak simultaneously of hardship, resilience, faith, and home, revealing how personal histories are inseparable from broader political and cultural narratives.
Tshepiso Moropa similarly begins with fragments: archival photographs, oral histories, dreams, and folktales, reassembling them into intricate collages and immersive installations that imagine the archive as a living, evolving space. Rooted in African historical memory and storytelling traditions, her work dissolves the boundaries between past and present, constructing poetic narratives that foreground ancestral knowledge, collective memory, and the possibilities of reimagining history.
Rather than seeking recovery or resolution, the exhibition embraces fragmentation, layering, and material transformation as ways of understanding how meemory endures – continually rewritten through the stories we inherit, the places we inhabit, and the futures we imagine. See Lead Photo above.
The THK Gallery will be the venue for the Opera UCT production of ‘Rewind’ which is part of the HEAT Festival. According to Jeremy Silver, director of Opera UCT, the concert is responding to the work of Thepiso Moropa. ‘Rewind’ brings together a selection of arias that revisit the past, echoing Moropa’s engagement with archives, memory and the act of looking back to look forward. Directed by Jeremy Silver, this performance brings together voice and visual art in a space built for both. This concert will take place on 12 August at 6:30pm. Book HERE.
NEWS FLASH: On the Arts Round Up on Fine Music Radio on Friday 31 July, Jeremy Silver will tell us about the Rewind Concert at THK Gallery,
Good reasons for heading to THK Gallery!
WHAT: The File Cannot Be Restored | Artists: Nicola Brandt, Sahlah Davids and Tshepiso Moropa
WHERE: THK Gallery, Cape Town. 52 Waterkant Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Opening 6 August 2026, 18h00–20h00 | 6 August – 1 October 2026 | ‘Rewind’ concert 12 August 18:30
INFO: T 021 470 0178 | E office@thkgallery.com | VISIT
LEAD PHOTO: Tshepiso Moropa, The Girl and the Pig, 2026,
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