Exhibition Opening: Glimpses of the Now
Please click on this link to access the Eventbrite page to book a ticket: Exhibition Opening: Glimpses of the Now Tickets, Wed 28 May 2025 at 18:00 | Eventbrite
Please note that the event booking page is for gauging attendance for the opening night only. The exhibition is open to the public from 28 May to 3 June 2025.
‘Glimpses of the 50s and 60s’, a series of thirty lithographic collages by South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa, reflects the tumultuous landscape of South Africa under apartheid. Completed in 2003, ‘Glimpses of the 50s and 60s’ brings together photographs from the artist’s family albums and photographs published in Drum, a renowned South African magazine that highlighted Johannesburg’s contemporary black urban culture and featured work by black photographers.
Collage has defined the work of influential South African artists throughout the twentieth century and had remained a defining feature of the work of contemporary artists across the Global South. The exhibition Glimpses of the Now places Nhlengethwa’s lithographic collages in conversation with works by six contemporary artists whose practices involve varied forms of collage-making: Alexia Ferreira (Brazil), Ethel Tawe (Cameroon/UK), Gê Viana (Brazil), Neo Matloga (South Africa/Netherlands), Phumulani Ntuli (South Africa), and Thato Toeba (Lesotho/Netherlands).
Glimpses of the Now reflects on why the practice of cutting and pasting has emerged, in both the twentieth and twenty first centuries, as a preferred visual language—not previously afforded by the conventions of photography—for representing and 𝘳𝘦-presenting the experiences of apartheid and post-apartheid, racism and xenophobia, as well as individual and collective identities. The exhibition explores further how collage disrupts photography’s coloniality, allowing for the fragmentation and juxtaposition, the merging and colliding, of multiple photographic frames, conceptually and practically.
The exhibition also showcases collages produced at workshops held at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett–UP) and at the University of Oxford with students and members of both universities' broader communities.
We invite you to the opening of 𝘎𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘰𝘸 on 28 May, from 18:00–21:00 PM, at Four Corners! We will be joined by South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa, who will be in conversation with the curators about his relationship to photography and collage in the context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.
This exhibition is made possible through the BRIDGE Fellowship, a partnership between the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett–UP) and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.
