BLOEMFONTEIN – The exhibition titled Beyond Walls: Emerging Contemporary Voices is still open for public viewing and for art patrons to enjoy at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum in Bloemfontein. Curated from the ArtbankSA Collection, it officially opened early in December and will close on 6 April.
This exhibition reveals urgent themes coursing through contemporary South African art: intergenerational knowledge transmission; cultural custodianship; memory’s contested territories; and identity’s continuous formation.
Art here unfolds through layers of remembrance and revelation.
Bheki Sibiya’s indigenous symbols encode ancestral knowledge of creation and time, whilst Hlavutelo Ngobeni’s clay vessels carry centuries of ritual significance.
Thalente Khomo’s haunting photograph Introspection: Usofa depicts a barefoot figure in white, identity obscured by a headdress, seated in an eerie space where childhood objects become portals to absence and memory.
Asiphile Luthuli’s large-scale charcoal drawings render stress and depression visible through masterful mark-making. Tshogofatso Nkhumeleng maps survival’s labyrinthine patterns where human determination mirrors rats navigating mazes – neither background nor circumstance determining destination.
The exhibition invites viewers to recognise their own negotiations with inheritance, memory, and becoming within these works. This is contemporary art that refuses to remain static.
