Built in 1921, the Grain Silo remains an iconic feature of Cape Town’s skyline.

The Architectural Tour gives visitors an insight into the industrial past of the Grain Silo building and its reformed architectural design by Thomas Heatherwick, of Heatherwick Studios. 

Inspired by grain corn, scaled up and used as a cutting tool, the impressive Atrium introduces visitors to what lies ahead, as well as the complex design processes and architecture of the building. 

From the pillowing, glazed panel windows that reflect Cape Town’s landscape to the found spaces that highlight the past life of the building, this audio tour will give visitors an in-depth understanding of Zeitz MOCAA’s architecture.

Zeitz MOCAA Architecture Audio Guide

Sala invites you to stay. A word shared among many Nguni languages in southern Africa, sala is part of a call and response between people parting ways - hamba kahle, a well-wishing of safe travels to those who are departing, sala kahle welcoming those who are staying behind to ‘stay well.’ Zeitz MOCAA welcomes you to stay with seventeen artists in our permanent collection; stay with us to re-imagine the museum as a new embodied space.

At the heart of Sala is a set of questions. What is a museum and who is it for? What are the inheritances of the museum and how do we make it anew? What are the ‘ways of seeing’ that are encouraged by a museum? How do we wish to see art, ourselves, and each other in a museum? We invite you as the audience to explore with us the limits and possibilities of the museum and to take part in this reflection and questioning.  

We welcome you to sit with us and with your senses – stay and be within your own bodies. Sala invites you to linger, to experience things with slowness. It offers multiple entry points for you to explore, to question and to challenge. You are invited to map the ways you occupy the museum. This invitation is extended through our exhibition guide and the process of map-making that asks you to engage playfully and critically with the relationships between meanings of works and images.

SALA Collection Exhibition

𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗜𝗘𝗦 is the first major South African museum solo exhibition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis.

𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗜𝗘𝗦 offers a series of propositions to reconceive our own relationship to forms of instruction and authority. Through a set of conceptual devices, the artist’s practice subverts and contends with universalised and exclusionary perceptions of the ‘known’ world.  

On display in 𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗜𝗘𝗦 is a new configuration of the widely-travelled, wall installation titled, 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘡𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘤 (𝘔𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘪)(2018–), which features iconography of Black and African liberation archives and its shared histories that, when mapped onto the southern hemisphere night sky, offer a counter system for thinking about global, celestial and universal relations. 
 
𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗜𝗘𝗦 forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of artists from Africa and the Diaspora.

UNDERSTUDIES

Zeitz MOCAA presents 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙊𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙉𝙤𝙬, a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 22 August 2024 and runs until Sunday, 20 July 2025.

This exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance.

Nguyen’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories. He opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures.

The exhibition presents three film works: Because No One Living Will Listen / Nguoi Song Chang Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). All three films are connected by the period 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin. This affirms a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond.

Nguyen creates sculptural objects that materialize his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicate embroidered tapestries of Viet Minh propaganda leaflets in Letters From the Other Side (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019).

The exhibition title highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the artist’s work. What is the other side of ‘now’? Is it ‘then’? And when was ‘then’? And what waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side? Through narration, Nguyen’s work probes history to bring to light lost stories that are intertwined with an unclear reality. These might be the same inherited stories that have been told over and over, but in time, there comes a longing to know more, a need to address the questions that were never asked and in turn, never answered. Is it possible to get to the other side and find a different ending? Can we reroute and rewrite histories that are personal and shared with the hope of one day arriving at a place of solace and closure?

The Other Side of Now forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualises the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in African history. In the spirit of radical solidarity, our programme looks beyond the continent’s borders, attending to new and old entanglements that implicate the world in Africa and Africa in the world.

𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘳𝘵.

The Other Side of Now

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) presents One Must Be Seated, a solo exhibition by Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan. 

Deeply rooted within her Ghanaian culture, Benissan’s practice has particular focus on the reimagining of the royal umbrella and stool, symbols of Akan chieftaincy. The exhibition explores the enstoolment of a prospective chief, akin to coronation; a call to take their rightful seat in the stool that has been chosen for them. The exhibition opens Wednesday, 13 November 2024 on Level 3, Silo Side of the museum, and runs until 5 October 2025.  

Through tapestry, sculpture, photography and video, Benissan’s work highlights and celebrates the rich traditions of Ghanaian culture, with a focus on Asante customs. The royal umbrella has been used since at least the 17th century, it transforms the individual underneath it, attributing significant status. Different sizes, colours, and unique gold totems that crown the umbrella canopy are seen as they move with the court in lively procession. Under the umbrella, the chief and his thoughts are hidden from the heavens above, prohibiting even God from accessing them.  

Benissan delicately reimagines this cultural object through the use of the archive. As we see in works like The Triumphant King Rules (?hene a wadi Nkonim No Di Tumi) (2023) portraits of past chiefs are embedded within the fabric of the umbrella which is traditionally made with woven Kente cloth and reinterpreted in rich velvet by the artist. Her works are made by the same craftsmen who make the royal umbrellas for the palace in Kumasi, the Asante capital. By intentionally naming these artisans as collaborators, the artist honours the hands that uphold the traditions of the chieftaincy. 

The exhibition layout simulates the enstoolment tradition with each successive gallery symbolising a stage in the process. Prompted by the new film, One Must Be Seated (2024), from which the exhibition takes its title, you are invited to be nominated and confronted by the ancestors. “Have you not seen the seat that we made for you? You were made to be seated.” Walking through, one passes the palace at dusk, depicted in an intricately woven tapestry, We Process at Sunrise (2024); receives a powerful affirmation of growth and renewal in the green shades of We Give Power to You (2024), another umbrella work; and is ultimately led to the final golden throne. It will embrace its chosen, sealing the bond between leader and legacy. When the time comes, will you be open to receive the call?

One Must Be Seated forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in the African present. 

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci, the Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa.

One Must Be Seated

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Sala Stop 1

Joël Andrianomearisoa
Kudzanai Chiurai
Salah Elmur
Frances Goodman
Tayie Idahor
Isaac Julien
Glenn Ligon
Thebetsile Magugu
Michele Mathison
Misheck Masamvu
Nandipha Mntambo
Daniella Mooney
Zanele Muholi
Ebony G. Patterson
Jody Paulsen
Thania Petersen
Athi-Patra Ruga
Brett Charles Seiler

The Zeitz MOCAA Permanent Collection was established in 2015 and is focused on contemporary artistic practices from Africa and its global diaspora. It consists of over 500 objects, ranging from works on paper and canvas, photographic prints, sculptures, video works, installations and more. Featuring artists from multiple countries, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Madagascar, the United States, Kenya, and Sudan, the collection is a rich testament to the diversity of contemporary practices from the continent and beyond.

A large part of the collection consists of a recent donation of artworks which were formerly on a long-term loan from art collector, and co-founder of the museum, Jochen Zeitz. Other works have been gifted to the museum by artists, collectors, and art enthusiasts.

Our collection is thoroughly contemporary and addresses several relevant discourses in Africa and the world today, like migration, human rights, visibility, memory, and desire. Notably, it includes works by some of the most celebrated artists working in the world today. We also hold comprehensive bodies of work from singular artists like Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi and Kudzanai Chiurai, amongst others.

There are a myriad of ways to describe the works in this exhibition, but we have picked eight key adjectives that speak to the variety of objects and ideas in the exhibition. Our glossary below is a guide to some of those related to the themes and concepts explored by artists.

MONOCHROME – often used to describe artworks that are black-and-white, this word comes from mono (one) and chroma (colour).

SERIAL – in series; similar or even identical individual artworks that come together in succession to form a larger body of work.

QUEER – a reclaimed umbrella term for LGBTQ+ people and other “outsiders” to social norms of gender and sexuality.

POLITICAL – relating to systems of power and social structures like nations, governments, and institutions.

TEXTUAL – using or relating to written language; based on reading and writing words to create meaning.

CAMP – having a deliberately theatrical sensibility; wittily extravagant; “extra”.

UNCANNY – slightly off or odd, and unsettlingly so, being beyond what is normal or expected; strange and mysterious; relates especially to the human figure.

ORGANIC – coming from natural living matter like a plant, an animal, or the soil.


Image Credit: Detail from Frances Goodman, Ophiophilia, 2014. Acrylic nails, glue, polyurethane foam, wire, resin and hessian object, 227 x 315 x 75cm. Zeitz MOCAA Permanent Collection, by kind donation ARTCO Trust (Private Collection).

Selections from the Collection - Stop 6

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Selections from the Collection - Stop 2

Zeitz MOCAA presents 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙊𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙉𝙤𝙬, a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The exhibition opens on Thursday, 22 August 2024 and runs until Sunday, 20 July 2025.

This exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance.  

Nguyen’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories. He opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures. 

The exhibition presents three film works: Because No One Living Will Listen / Nguoi Song Chang Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). All three films are connected by the period 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin. This affirms a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond. 

Nguyen creates sculptural objects that materialize his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicate embroidered tapestries of Viet Minh propaganda leaflets in Letters From the Other Side (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019). 

The exhibition title highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the artist’s work. What is the other side of ‘now’? Is it ‘then’? And when was ‘then’? And what waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side? Through narration, Nguyen’s work probes history to bring to light lost stories that are intertwined with an unclear reality. These might be the same inherited stories that have been told over and over, but in time, there comes a longing to know more, a need to address the questions that were never asked and in turn, never answered. Is it possible to get to the other side and find a different ending? Can we reroute and rewrite histories that are personal and shared with the hope of one day arriving at a place of solace and closure?  

The Other Side of Now forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualises the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in African history. In the spirit of radical solidarity, our programme looks beyond the continent’s borders, attending to new and old entanglements that implicate the world in Africa and Africa in the world.

𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘳𝘵.

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Stop 5 - Spring is Rebellious

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Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is the first major museum in Africa dedicated to contemporary art. We collect, preserve, research & exhibit cutting edge contemporary art from Africa & the Diaspora & host temporary exhibitions from around the world

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa

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