Collection: Nothing has been Whole for Some Time

Nothing Has Been Whole For Some Time

29.04.26 – 06.06.26

There are moments when the world stops holding together in the way we expect it to. Time slips. Edges blur. What seemed singular begins to double, to echo, to layer. The familiar remains, but it no longer settles into place. This quiet unravelling marks the threshold at which surrealist impulses take hold, shifting perception from the external world to the interior terrain of the self.

Quiet is an inevitable part of being human. It is within this quiet that surrealist impulses reside, as a condition of vulnerability and exposure. Quiet turns attention inward, toward the interior life where these impulses take shape and find expression. It allows for an untethering of one’s gaze from the world as it is known and seen, making space to surrender to the wilderness of one’s inner life. To echo W. E. B. Du Bois’s: not a consciousness that is irrevocably doubled, but one oriented toward surrender.

This understanding of quiet as a shared human condition is reflected in the artists’ practices within 'Nothing Has Been Whole For Some Time'. Surrealism, in this context, exists beyond the idea of an escape. It is a means of attending to what is already present. It allows realities shaped by memory, mental health, care, and history to emerge on their own terms—holding multiplicity without requiring resolution.

Nothing here is entirely unfamiliar.

But nothing remains singular for long.

Look without trying to make it whole.

You will find that nothing has been whole for some time.

Mika Said, 2026.

This exhibition brings together contemporary artists from Southern Africa, Raymond Fuyana, Liam Van Der Heever, Mhlonishwa Zulu, Hargreaves Ntukwana, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Nazeer Jappie, Jaden Wells, Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza, Churchill Ongere, Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa, Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi, Nwabisa Ntlokwana and Ulriche Jantjes.

The artists in, 'Nothing Has Been Whole For Some Time', navigate a landscape where mourning is not exceptional but deeply embedded in everyday life. Where, as the exhibition suggests, grief becomes both routine and resistant. Across painting, collage, and digital practices, there is a shared turn inward: Hargreaves Ntukwana abstracts bodies in a manner that keeps them in a state of transformation, blurring and merging. Teresa Kutala Firmino’s constructed interiors rework fragmented archives into new narratives of African history, investigating the ongoing trauma African people experience in the aftermath of colonisation. Jaden Wells constructs and reconstructs through the process of making and un-making to more deeply explore memory and identity, particularly referencing mental health within the Cape Flats community. Raymond Fuyana’s experience of the world as a deaf person enhances his visual experience of the world. With his unique colour coding, he draws the viewer into worlds where fantasy and technology converge with his interpretation of the environment.

Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi holds the weight of social and political realities in distorted, repetitive figuration. This interiority extends into the domestic and spiritual registers of Nazeer Jappie, grounding their practices in spaces where meaning is both constructed and withheld. Jappie’s movement from exterior landscapes into intimate interiors, and from burning trees to their symbolic remnants, echoes a shift from spectacle to reflection. In a similar vein, Ulriche Jantjes practice constantly seeks out realities that wander beyond, in murkier, ambiguous reaches. She paints with a particular way of seeing, using her internal visual cues; she landscapes with clues formed and mapped out in her inner world. In parallel, Van Der Heever’s process, rooted in making first and theorising later, mirrors a more instinctive navigation of interior life. His increasingly precise, cubist-influenced compositions draw from domestic forms and furniture, collapsing structure and subject into spaces that feel both constructed and unsettled.

Additionally, into the existential and metaphysical inquiries of Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa and Mhlonishwa Zulu, where art becomes a space for processing death, continuity, and belief. In parallel, Churchill Ongere negotiates displacement and power through imagined memory and subtle political tension. At the same time, Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza returns to landscape as a site of ancestral presence and ecological consciousness, resisting inherited colonial ways of seeing.

Together, these practices poignantly reflect a local condition of living with ongoing rupture without trying to make it whole. Here, surrealism operates as a necessary language for holding contradiction, reworking memory, and imagining continuity beyond loss.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Churchill Ongere

Hargreaves Ntukwana

Jaden Wells

Liam Van Der Heever

Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa

Mzuzile Mduduzi Xakaza

Mhlonishwa Zulu

Nazeer Jappie

Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi

Nwabisa Ntlokwana

Raymond Fuyana

Teresa Kutala Firmino

Ulriche Jantjes