See an Algerian city made from couscous, walk through clouds of dreams, experience doors as portals, and hear ritual soundscapes of rain at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's (JCAF) annual exhibition, Structures. On show until Sat, Nov 15, 2025, this group exhibition brings together artists and architects from the South to explore the built environment. It will change how you look at buildings, cities, and the way we move through them. Book a guided walkabout here.

While Johannesburg's beat can be rapid and erratic, Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) takes a distinctly slow approach, offering only one exhibition each year, and yet it never feels out of sync with either the city around it or its art scene. This is in large part due to the foundation's meticulous research and the care that goes into curating their exhibitions, as well as the programmes around them.

The positioning of JCAF's exhibitions is unique in that it encourages individual reflection and engagement with the work, with their guided tours ensuring you leave with a wealth of new knowledge and provocations. 

Making worlds with JCAF

It's not a traditional art space, nor is it strictly speaking a museum. Every three years JCAF embarks on a new research theme, explored from various angles through a trilogy of exhibitions. Their first theme, Feminist Identities, concluded with Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South, which put three iconic woman painters in dialogue with each other. 

The group exhibition Ecospheres (2024) was the first in JCAF's Worldmaking trilogy, launching an exploration of the varied worlds around us as well as how we interact with and shape them. While Ecospheres focused its reflection on the natural world and our place in it, Structures (2025) carries the theme over into the built environment. Futures (2026) will address and explore the techno-future.

Engaging with Structures

Not one to shy away from a challenge, JCAF grew plants in their exhibition space and brought a Frida Kahlo painting from Mexico to South Africa, but Structures is their grandest undertaking yet.

They have built a city from couscous, recreated a Brazilian installation from the 70s, and have brought MADEYOULOOK's work for the 2024 Venice Biennale to home soil. Part of the excitement in the lead-up to the exhibition is as much in how they transform the space as it is in the work on show.

Broadly, Structures looks at the multitude of ways in which people connect with places. JCAF’s Executive Director and curator of the exhibition, Clive Kellner says, “At the heart of these concerns lies a central question: How have indigenous forms of artistry, tradition, and knowledge contributed to architecture and everyday life in the Global South – more especially in a South African context?”

Indeed, what JCAF and the artists have chosen to highlight is how we interact with space, and how relevant questions of space are to our present times and the issues we face. From this broad theme, questions extending to home and belonging, the ways in which memory and knowledge are created, as well as race, colonialism, and migration are explored.

"Structures shows how the world around us is shaped by the constant dialogue and interactions of ordinary people, and it allows us to reflect on these processes."

POINTS OF ENTRY
After walking through JCAF's arched metal entrance, the first thing you will notice is a new, and seemingly unfinished, addition to the building, some wooden scaffolding by the artist Stephen Hobbs. Commissioned for Structures, this scaffolding, as well as the mural by Rebecca Potterton, prove the perfect entry points for the exhibition.

Hobbs' scaffolding is a celebration of the 'spectacle of the unfinished', and while it acknowledges the physical structures and buildings that spring up in the process of construction, it also points to what gets left behind or changed in spaces, as a result of people's bodies and hands. Potterton's mural Marks of Home features intricate illustrations of the varied architectures present in the Global South, highlighting the ingenuity and resilience of the built environments of these communities. It brings structures that are often marginalised in dominant Western modes of knowledge to the fore.

OF MEMORY AND MIGRATION
From here, you enter the darkened exhibition space, the amber light illuminating the artworks and installations diffuses through the room, and the bustle of Jan Smuts Avenue fades away.

The first section of the exhibition has the title 'Situatedness' and looks at belonging, heritage, memory and migration. You are immediately greeted by Kader Attia's scale model of the city Ghardaïa in Algeria. Made out of couscous, the city, which took hours for the team at JCAF to cook, let alone construct, is overlooked by portraits of Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon, two key figures in Western architecture. Here, Attia shows how both architects used and were influenced by Mozabite architecture, and complicates narratives about what gets acknowledged and valorised in history.

Attia's precarious work also points to the thousands of lives who inhabit a city's architecture, and the sand-like quality of the couscous reminds one of how buildings and spaces are ultimately impermanent; a wave of history from crumbling away and being rebuilt anew. While it's currently an immaculate construction, as the couscous dries out, it will eventually start to crumble and collapse throughout the exhibition, further highlighting the ephemeral nature of even that which we take to be indestructible.

Change-ability is one of the aspects we love most about JCAF's offerings: space is allowed for works to shape-shift and deepen in meaning as they do so. This kind of evolution is often built into the curatorial process.

The works of Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Jellel Gasteli, and Hajra Waheed cast their eye at the more personal habits and memories that we develop in relation to space. Bineshtarigh's Panel Beaters Wall III shows the residues, discolourations, and marks left by workers in a panel beating shop. Across from this are Gasteli's haunting, almost painterly photographs of doors. More suggestion than form, they point to the potential that buildings hold, and the fact that it is not just the physical activity which brings a space to life, but the memories of its inhabitants which come to animate it.

These works are brilliantly in dialogue with Waheed's This Is Not a Door, Just a Sense There Might Be One at Some Point 1-2 – a pair of porcelain sculptures which, though small in scale, draw you in. It was great watching people bending down to peer through them, and wondering about the worlds they were seeing through the doors.

BUILDINGS AND THEIR IDEOLOGY
The second section of Structures is the most overtly architectural. Titled 'Infrastructures', it looks at the forms of building themselves, as well as the ideologies that get projected onto them. Here, photographs by David Goldblatt are given new life by contrasting them with the work of Matri-archi(tecture), an all-women architecture collective which invites us to reconsider our relations to buildings and monuments from South Africa's history.

These grand monuments are contrasted with the ingenious structures that ordinary people make as they struggle to survive and imprint themselves in our society with Kiluanji Kia Henda's photographic series, Structures of Survival (Namibe Desert), and Hélio Oiticica's reconstructed work from the 70s, PN 28 “Nas Quebradas”. During our walkabout, Kellner demonstrated how visitors may climb up and down this particular structure, which we attempted with JCAF guide Maxine Maistry afterwards. Not as easy as it looks, but a refreshing departure from the typical art rules of "look, don't touch". 

These works in concert are a provocation from JCAF to reflect on which structures we value as a society, and what forms of architecture become celebrated.

SPACE TO EXPLORE
The exhibition concludes with 'Typologies', where Igshaan Adams and the MADEYOULOOK collective create worlds for us to explore and get lost in. The wire dust clouds of Adams' Gebedswolke take us into the paths and dreams of those navigating spatial Apartheid in Cape Town. An incredibly moving piece, the space of contemplation it creates sets up MADEYOULOOK's interactive installation, Dinokana, perfectly. Created for the South African Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, it is an incredible privilege to get to see Dinokana on home soil, and we are still lost in the soundscapes of rain, song, and dialogue, which look at questions of land and the process of returning to it.

An exhibition not to be missed

While JCAF's exhibitions always feel charged and relevant, Structures touches on so many important questions for Johannesburg itself as we continue to navigate the post-Apartheid landscape and the complicated legacies that our built environment carries. While the work is cerebral and theoretical, it never feels out of touch with reality, and the excellent guides at JCAF make engaging with the exhibition a wonderful and inclusive experience.

Perhaps what we most love about Structures is that it does not posit questions of architecture and space just for the professionals, but rather shows how the world around us is shaped by the constant dialogue and interactions of ordinary people, and it allows for us to reflect on these processes, and reconsider our own relationship to the built environment.

In addition to their exhibition programme, JCAF have started several other initiatives to push knowledge from the Global South. These include their School of the South lecture series, their podcast Knowledge Talks, and now the JCAF Journal, which brings together the research that goes into their exhibitions. All of these can be accessed on their website, and are a great way to delve further into the conversations their exhibitions create.

Book a free guided tour of Structures before the exhibition ends on Sat, Nov 15, 2025. Whether you're a return or first-time visitor to Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, you won't be disappointed.