Ga ke se bope ga se ipope - Fragments of what we carry
A solo exhibition
Featured artists: Lerato Motaung
- Venue: NWU Gallery (North-West University, Building F16G, Hoffman Street, Potchefstroom. 2530)
- Opening date: 20 May 2026
- Closing date: 24 July 2026
Curated by Khumo Sebambo. Ga ke se bope, Ga se ipope brings together second-hand luggage that carry traces of previous journeys. Marked, worn, and handled by many hands, these objects arrive already filled with memory. Rather than treating them as empty materials, Motaung allows their histories to exist alongside his own reflections on movement, loss, and carrying. Working with aged suitcases, the artist reactivates objects that might otherwise have been discarded. Repetition, drawn from painting and printmaking, moves from image-making into the room, where objects repeat and build on one another like layered impressions. Audiences no longer observe from a distance but move around and through the work, encountering materials that hold emotional weight. Fragments shape the exhibition. Memory appears not as a complete narrative but as pieces held together over time. Born in Katlehong, raised in the Northwest, and now based in Johannesburg, Motaung reflects on identity as something continually formed through history, place, and movement.
18:00
Strictly RSVP at gallery@nwu.ac.za.
Repair of the present
A group exhibition
Featured artists: Abongile Sidzumo, Bulumko Mbete, Cassian Robbertze, Dimakatso Mathopa, Henrico Greyling, Luyanda Zindela, Neo Theku, Omolemo Rammile, Rohini Amratlal, Sphephelo Mnguni and Thalente Khomo
- Venue: NWU Gallery (North-West University, Building F16G, Hoffman Street, Potchefstroom. 2530)
- Opening date: 20 May 2026
- Closing date: 24 July 2026
Curated by Sheryl Msomi In contemporary South African youth culture, sovereignty emerges as a negotiated condition that is formed from the self and the collective, that exists between personal identity and histories that cannot be disowned. To be sovereign in this context is not to escape inheritance, but to decide how it is carried, transformed, or resisted. If the youth of 1976 contested the classroom, then fifty years later the artists brought together in Repair of the Present contest the archive. They question who gets to keep culture, who tells the story, and how memory must be handled. In Repair of the Present, sovereignty is asserted through control over visibility, narration, and access, including the refusal to be fully legible even within a history that demands constant testimony. Domestic labour, indigenous knowledge, and mobility surface as collective memories sustained not through monuments or official archives, but through repetition and use. Sovereignty here resides in self-invention and accepting responsibility for sustaining what has been inherited, often invisibly, often undervalued. This exhibition marks the beginning of an ongoing curatorial inquiry into what it means to be a sovereign being and offers an initial proposition for what sovereign culture might look like in a highly interconnected and distracted world.
18:00
Strictly RSVP at gallery@nwu.ac.za.