Exhibition openings and hot tickets

Sat, Aug 30 – Sun, Aug 31 – Tickets are on sale for this year's edition of CONTRA.Joburg, South Africa's biggest open studios event and most unique art festival. This year some 100+ artists, designers, and makers will participate, as 12 of Joburg's most exciting art spaces open their doors. Get your tickets here.

Last chance to see

Until Sat, Aug 16 – What do you get following an intense artistic engagement with a scientific subject – the approximately 2.5–2.8-million-year-old Taung skull, which was discovered in 1924? Joni Brenner's solo exhibition at Wits Origins Centre, Impact, which encapsulates her long-term creative reckoning with the child's skull, broadly explores themes of "fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure, and chance". Unusual, poignant, and thought-provoking are a few more words that come to mind when describing Brenner's response to this ancient piece of the story of human evolution. Read our interview with Joni Brenner here.

Until Mon, Aug 18 – Melrose Gallery brings together the boldest voices in contemporary African art for The Alchemy of Colour. The exhibition features artists from Melrose Gallery's stable, such as Esther Mahlangu and Paul Blomkamp, as well as many others who use colour 'not just as pigment but energy'.

Until Wed, Aug 20 – Goodman Gallery hosts Yinka Shonibare’s Earth Pictures, an exhibition looking at the impact of Western colonisation and industrialisation on nature and climate change across the African continent. Both beautiful and pertinent, this is an exhibition you don't want to miss.

Until Fri, Aug 22 – Meleko Mokgosi's solo Speculations on Drawing opens at Stevenson Gallery this Saturday. Happening concurrently with his exhibition Appellations at Stevenson Cape Town, the works on show are from an ongoing project of his, Spaces of Subjection, where he looks at the physical, discursive, and otherworldly, and how we form subjects in the world. The works span screen prints, etchings, chine collé, dry point, charcoal, and digital drawing on three-dimensional objects, showcasing Mokgosi's effortless balancing act of line and space to examine drawing as process, concept, and a theoretical framework.

Until Sat, Aug 23 – Fertile Ground at Gallery 2 is a group exhibition hosted in collaboration with ark.contemporary, a gallery based in Rosendal, Free State. The exhibition aims to showcase the contemporary Free State art space, as well as bring it into conversation with a more urban context. Taken together, the artworks bring a fresh reading of the contrast and combination of the rural and urban.

Until Sat, Aug 23 – David Krut Projects' latest exhibition at The Blue House gallery, Still Life: A Contemporary Arrangement, hosts a collection of still lives from their affiliated artists. Often overlooked as a genre, the show highlights how it is an important space for experimentation and expression. With stalwarts such as William Kentridge and Deborah Bell alongside exciting upcoming artists such as Boemo Diale, Maja Maljević, and many more, the featured works show the varied ways the genre is interpreted, and the different objects that might catch the artist's eye, inviting us to reconsider the ordinary.

Until Fri, Aug 29 – Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts' exhibition Weird, Wonderful, Quirky and Peculiar uses Salvador Dali's Dix Recettes d'Immortalite (Ten Recipes for Immortality) as a launching point to bring out other strange and surreal works from their collection. Aside from what is one of Dali's great graphic works, you can expect to have your ideas of what a book should be confounded by unusual binding methods, paper, words, and images.

Until Sun, Aug 31 – Head to Keyes Art Mile to see their newly renovated Gallery 1 space with the exhibition Looking Back, Seeing Now, a powerful survey of South Africa's modernist masters and how South Africa's art scene has evolved through repression and resistance.

Until Sun, Aug 31 – If you're looking for art, 223 Creative Hub is the place to be as Berman Contemporary has two must-see shows: Mellaney Roberts' clay sculptures pay homage to her history and ancestors in Waar Bloed Nie Loop Nie and the timely group exhibition Happy Women's Day, I Guess… looks at the conflicted experience of womanhood in South Africa.

Until Sun, Aug 31 – Standard Bank Art Lab brings the exhibition It's Woven Into Who We Are to their space on Nelson Mandela Square. Curated by Dr Same Mdluli, manager of the Standard Bank Art Lab, the exhibition brings together artists who use tapestry to explore memory and collective storytelling. With tapestries from the Standard Bank Corporate Art Collection, the Standard Bank African Art Collection, as well as tapestries loaned from the William Kentridge and Stephens Tapestry Studios, the works are an exquisite display of craftsmanship.

Until end August – Gallery MOMO's group show Cacophony of Narratives brings a varied set of voices to explore the complexities of storytelling today. Featuring works by Vivien Kohler, Conrad Botes, Khaya Witbooi, Khaya Sineyile, Phoka Nyokong, Joël Mpah Dooh, Ransome Stanley, and Leffi Tladi, the exhibition looks at how art can be used as a site of resistance and disjuncture in our present-day crises.

Until end August – Head to David Krut's Blue House Gallery this Saturday for Diamond Dust Apostrophes by Pebofatso Mokoena. The exhibition is a result of a residency in the remote diamond town of Oranjemund, Namibia, where Mokoena explores how we feel and remember space. Working with Sbongiseni Khulu and the David Krut Workshop, Mokoena uses drawing, collage, and printmaking techniques to offer "not a map of a place, but a visual language of experience – unfixed, atmospheric, and deeply personal." 

Until end August – Pop in to 44 Stanley to see works from the gallery's group exhibition Planting Seeds. The all-women exhibition brings together paintings and drawings that explore the theme of growth and transformation. From breathtaking depictions of nature to intricate explorations of thoughts and dreams, the artists reflect on the complex entanglements between our inner and outer worlds. 

Until end August – NO END Contemporary's latest exhibition is a collaboration with Hausmayhem a.k.a. Molly Roberts. The exhibition takes place in two parts: Just Between Us is a selection of solo works by Roberts, while With Friends Like These is a group exhibition curated by Roberts.

In Just Between Us, Roberts brings her expressive ceramics and mixed-media works exploring the 'quiet strangeness of organic form'. Then, With Friends Like These brings together a varied and thrilling group of contemporaries and collaborators with works in film, photography, print, painting, sculpture, poetry, and more.

Until Thu, Sep 4 – Remembering and Forgetting: Landscapes in Dialogue is a powerful exhibition by artist and activist Kim Berman at UJ Art Gallery. Berman is a remarkable figure in the art world. The co-founder of Artist Proof Studio, this exhibition marks the artist's first solo in 15 years and sees her bringing both new and old work to explore familiar themes of destruction and renewal.

Until Sat, Sep 6 – With the Secret Lives of Plants in the Barnes Road Herbarium at Origins Centre, Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus at Wits University, brings a collection of herbaria and botanical prints made during her time at Barnes Road Herbarium in Brixton. The preserved plants, prints, and illustrations have an often surprising beauty, and reveal the intricacies of their form not usually visible to the human eye.

Until Sat, Sep 13 – By bringing the work of Mapula Embroidery Project to Wits Art Museum (WAM), the exhibition 2020 Through the Eye of a Needle: Remembering the Covid-19 Pandemic in 2025 provides a space for reflection on the strange times of Covid. From the absurd: spraying oneself with sanitiser and not being able to find any toilet paper, to the heartwarming: cue the penguins taking over Simonstown, and all the other aches, pains, and joys we all went through. WAM has created a number of ways for the public to engage in this process of remembering. Add your own mark to the exhibition before it closes.

Until Sun, Sep 28 – An installation series at Museum Africa, Fashion Accounts reimagines how we collect, archive, and create memories through fashion objects. Curated by fashion designers and curators Wanda Lephoto, Erica de Greef, and Alison Moloney, it also considers the absence of black South African fashion histories in traditional museum collections. Says Lephoto, "It is in the gaps, the absences, the fragments that we need to look to find ourselves when our stories are not acknowledged in the record."

Until Tue, Sep 30 – Lizamore on Keyes' new group exhibition, Dusk, brings together artists whose practices – be it painting, drawing, or digital – explore atmosphere and "the emotional tones that emerge in moments of pause."

Until end September – Latitudes Centre for the Arts presents its third annual Women’s Month exhibition, Skin, curated by Boitumelo Makousu and Denzo Nyathi. Skin uses the body’s largest organ as both subject and metaphor, a living threshold between inner and outer worlds. The works explore how identity is shaped by both interior and exterior forces, reflecting on memory, rest as a radical act of reclamation, and the ongoing negotiation between subjecthood and objecthood in a world that is always watching. Featuring artists Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Farhana Jacobs, Mira Jaan, Lerato Ntili, and Kerri Liebovitz.

Until Sat, Nov 15 – Structures forms the second part of Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's Worldmaking series. The exhibition sees the featured artists, architects, and the team at JCAF use research, technology, and art to explore the relationship between humans and the built environment. Comprising a trilogy of exhibitions, Structures will be accompanied by talks, walkabouts, publications, and more episodes of JCAF's podcast series, Knowledge Talks. Book a guided walkabout here.

Until April 30, 2026 – One and the Many at Javett-UP brings the old and the new together. This group exhibition will explore the way in which artists navigate the relationship between the individual and the collective. By bringing leading South African contemporary artists into dialogue with the collections at Javett-UP, it promises to be a fascinating exhibition that "aims to open up different possibilities for reading images and artwork." 

Ongoing – NIROX Sculpture Park and the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture's exhibition Villa+ the next generation is an ambitious project across their grounds and interior spaces looking at the work and influence of Edoardo Villa. Featuring sculptures by Nicholas Hlobo, Willem Boshoff, William Kentridge, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Jane Alexander, Jackson Hlungwani, and Walter Oltmann, as well as 35 of Villa's works, the exhibition is "a conversation across generations, rooted in sculptural mastery, innovation and cultural diversity".

Save the date

Wondering what else to do this week? Read our weekly events guide here. For our latest updates, follow us on Instagram.