Exhibition Opening Night | 28 May | 6pm - 8pm Book Here

Free admission | Open Wednesday - Saturday 11.00am - 6.00pm

'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 has 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.

Funding Partners:

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.

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 (TORCH) at the University of Oxford.