Past Disquiet is a documentary and archival exhibition based on research conducted by the curators for over a decade around four seed collections of art that were intended to be “museums in solidarity” or “museums in exile”, that incarnated the engagement of artists with a particular political cause. It is an exhibition of stories, told with documents, photographs, pamphlets, press clippings, posters, interviews, and videos.

The research began as the two curators explored how the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which took place in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1978 and was meant to become the nucleus for a museum in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle. Despite the size and scope of the exhibition, yet unprecedented for the region, it seems to have been totally forgotten. The story of that museum was closely connected to other similar collections and initiatives, namely, the International Museum of The Resistance ‘Salvador Allende’, the Artists Contre/Against Apartheid, and Art for the People of Nicaragua. Their reconstructed stories trace complex and intersecting networks, and rarely explored history of politically engaged artists mobilized in different modes around the causes inscribed in the tri-continental international anti-imperialist solidarity movement of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, such as the opposition to the Vietnam War, the rejection of the Pinochet dictatorship and of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and in support of the Palestinian struggle.

Much like detectives, the curators followed threads from Beirut, Paris, Rome, Rabat, Baghdad, Tokyo, Venice, Santiago, Managua, and Cape Town, back and forth, tracking one thousand and one stories of artists and militants: visionaries and dreamers who organized exhibitions, intervened in public spaces, and created a very particular form of museum to incarnate the causes they were fighting for: museums of solidarity, without walls and museums that were in exile. Eventually, the research refracted an unwritten, or scarcely documented, shared history of politically engaged artists and initiatives, that links grassroots artist collectives in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Gaborone and Cape Town, artist unions in Damascus, Baghdad, and Casablanca, seminal editions of the Venice Biennial of art, as well as the Arab art biennials in Baghdad and Rabat, and museums in Santiago, Chile and Cape Town. Eventually, we came to realize that we were surfacing a counter-history of art practice, of exhibition histories, of museology, and political mobilization through art worldwide.

The first edition of the exhibition was produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2015; the second edition by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in 2016; the third was produced by the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) and the last was produced by the Sursock Museum in Beirut, both in 2018. This new edition, produced by the Zeitz MOCAA, brings home stories of international solidarity in the arts with struggle against Apartheid and has provided the opportunity to access local archives and to engage with militants, historians, and scholars, and create an additional chapter that foregrounds the vibrant resonance of local militant artistic practice from the 1970s and 1980s with kin practices worldwide. 

Research for Past Disquiet was made possible thanks to the support of Rana Sadik and Samer Younis, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), ZedGrant, the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), Tensta Konsthall, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej Warszawie, tranzit.hu, and the Institut national de l’histoire de l’art.

Zeitz MOCAA’s curatorial and educational programming is generously supported by Gucci and the Mellon Foundation.

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Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers features seven artists whose lens-based work explores accounts and experiences connected to the nonphysical world. This invisible world can be thought of as spiritual, supernatural, psychological, or abstract. It is an otherworldly realm. Using experimental film, immersive installation, performance, sound, and narration, the artists depict how ritual, devotion and acts of remembrance can offer connectedness, bring restoration, or provide alternative ways of seeing oneself within the cycle of life.

Participating lens-based artists include Gladys Kalichini, Latedjou, Sekai Machache, Nyancho NwaNri, Pamina Sebastião, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Helena Uambembe

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Self as a Forgotten Monument is the first museum solo exhibition by Mame-Diarra Niang presented by Zeitz MOCAA. Organised as a survey of the artist’s practice over the past decade, the project brings together significant bodies of work in dialogue in a spatial choreography. 

Niang’s prolific practice is characterised by an exploratory, abstract and subversive approach to lens-based media working across photography, moving image and immersive audio-visual installation. 

The title of the exhibition is an invitation to embrace the artist’s notion of “Plasticity of the Territory”, a concept that is foundational to her practice and asserts an inner territory that names life as an experience in and of itself.  In her own words, “I have come to think of the self as a territory made of well-curated memories and erasures (…) – a place where being itself is a forgotten monument; where even the most persistent conception of identity dissolves in front of us.”  

A monument in Niang’s world registers as a commemorative structure of remembrance, an offering to remind us of a never-ending metamorphosis of the self. Her work is an act of remembering and forgetting, through which she resists categorisation and assumptions about geographies and specificities. It is an inner space odyssey to build a self-portrait in constant mutation.  

There are several prompts within the exhibition, where Niang challenges the viewer to see beyond the recognizable. The artist states, “I carve the land, I sculpt what is living, I decontextualize. Then, I reconstruct a territory with fragments of existing landscapes.” 

The exhibition presents a constellation of two key trilogies – bodies of work that are thematically related or stem from a particular period in her oeuvre. The first “The Citadel” features the series Sahel Gris (2013), At the Wall (2014) and Metropolis (2016) and the second “Remember to Forget” consists of the series: Call Me When You Get There (2020), Léthé (2021) and Sama Guent Guii (2021).  

These works are central to Niang’s journey as a self-taught artist whose inward-looking process of image-making actively challenges the conventions of documentary and portraiture photography. 

This survey exhibition includes new iterations of Niang’s immersive room installations; they ground the artist’s sensibility and personal meaning-making embedded in her practice and are site-specific to Zeitz MOCAA, whilst retaining a lineage to the different spaces that the works have previously occupied. Since Time Is Distance in Space, a multiscreen filmic installation that envelops the viewer, also includes a nuanced musical score composed and recorded by Niang.   

Self As a Forgotten Monument 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 its diaspora.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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