As the FNB Art Joburg Fair hangovers subside, clarity begins to set in.
There was good art, good artists and good galleries. But something was lacking on the experiential side.
Nonetheless, my Johannesburg stint was not only about the art fair. There was a whole lot more at play in the City of Gold. Quite a lot, actually.
From 20 August to 14 September 2026, through Open City, a collaboration with Brand South Africa, Johannesburg became an extended exhibition of sorts. Art, music, fashion, design, food and performance spilled into galleries, studios, hotels and assorted places where one does not usually expect to encounter a curator.
There was Contra Joburg: two days, 16 venues, 177 artists and enough activity to make “art weekend” feel slightly inadequate. I visited Usha Seerajim’s studio in Ophirton, as well as several others in Victoria Yards and Braamfontein.
Goodman Gallery in Parkwood opened Mikhael Subotzky’s "A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick)", running until 31 October 2026. A must-see, especially the Mercedes and its stories.
At Nine Yards, Kumalo | Turpin had, and still has, two exhibitions on the go: Nathaniel Sheppard III’s "Pickpocketed Inheritance" and Wim Legrand’s "Off Script". There was also the well-attended Acts of Care exhibition, which digs into the township AIDS project archive.
The opening was at the Latitudes Centre for the Arts (LCA), Shepstone Gardens, on 5 September and it runs until 1 December 2026.
Even the Radisson RED in Rosebank got in on the act, transforming its lobby and bar areas into something resembling a giant gallery through its emerging artists initiative. This time, it has brought in WORLDART gallery’s Norman O’Flynn, whose popular culture works now occupy the hotel’s public spaces.
And then there was Zeitz MOCAA. Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa arrived in Johannesburg with something approaching a full travelling band. They didn’t quite bring their Silo District V&A Waterfront building with them, but they did something almost as interesting: they brought their museum concept, staff and programmes.
The Zeitz programme in Johannesburg began at NIROX with a dialogue on the place of "Ubuntu in Law, Art and Politics", featuring Justice Albie Sachs, Dr Phokeng Setai and Khanyisile Mawhayi. It continued at FNB Art Joburg, where Zeitz’s ORG booth presented Nolan Oswald Dennis’s "A: Black Consciousness of Spacetime" exhibition and ECLIPTICS monograph publication launch.
Then, on Saturday 5 September, the programme moved to [Thebe] Magugu House in Dunkeld for a Zeitz cocktail event, where Tiffany Andrews, the museum’s Global Patronage and Partnerships Manager, offered a glimpse into its approach to partnerships and the road towards its tenth anniversary in 2027.
The incoming director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, who takes up the position on 1 October 2026, also gave a video speech. Taken together, all of this suggested something more than a museum merely participating in an art-fair programme.
I sat down with Assistant Curator at Zeitz MOCAA, Dr Phokeng Setai, to get the museum’s view of its Johannesburg excursion.
“The museum participated in FNB Art Joburg for the third consecutive year. A key reason for this continued participation is the opportunity to extend the museum’s reach beyond Cape Town, while activating and cultivating relationships with audiences, artists, institutions and cultural practitioners in Johannesburg,” said Setai.
The thing is, museums are destination places. You don’t get many travelling museums. You go to them. Zeitz’s Johannesburg great trek offered another model: the museum as something that can travel conceptually, if not physically.
“It was important for Zeitz MOCAA to have a presence at FNB Art Joburg as a demonstration of its support for the broader South African art ecosystem. While museums are not traditionally understood as commercial entities, they are nevertheless important stakeholders in the development, formation and sustained vitality of an art ecosystem.”
The art fair is fundamentally a commercial environment. Galleries sell. Collectors buy. Artists occupy booths with varying degrees of optimism. Museums, meanwhile, collect, preserve, research, interpret and exhibit.
Zeitz’s great trek was not confined to the Sandton Convention Centre. It headed off to NIROX Sculpture Park at the Cradle of Humankind. For a talk.
NIROX is also working on Ubuntu Reimagined, centred on the life and work of former Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, which shares thematic territory with Zeitz’s "Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs", which ended last month.
“The talk at NIROX provided us with an opportunity to bring the two exhibitions [Mokgoro and Sachs] into dialogue and to explore the resonances and points of departure between them,” Setai explained.
The museum’s third location was Magugu House, the Afro-modernist cultural hub and concept store by Thebe Magugu, who was also there. It was more of a social affair, an opportunity to mingle with the who’s who of the art world, Zeitz staff and sponsors.
The most intriguing part of the excursion for me, however, was the decision to centre their entire FNB Art Joburg presence around one artist only: Nolan Oswald Dennis.
Dennis’s ECLIPTICS publication launch had originally been scheduled for 10 May 2025 as part of the "Understudies" symposium. But that was also the day the Zeitz MOCAA’s former director, Koyo Kouoh, died in Switzerland. The launch could not proceed as planned.
“Given the importance of the publication and the quality of its design and content, the fair provided an appropriate platform to bring it back into public view and introduce it to a broader audience,” said Setai.
There was another layer to the Dennis presentation. I struggled to appreciate the works on show at their art-fair booth: dissected fragments resembling bricks from a larger site-specific work that the artist had on show at Zeitz from October 2024 to May 2025.
The work was co-produced with members of the museum’s Exhibition Management, Collections and Registrarial teams. Its intention was to disrupt and reconfigure the power dynamics within the museum by giving staff members agency in the production of the work.
It also reiterated a simple fact: institutions, museums included, are made and remade through artists, audiences, staff, partnerships, arguments, exhibitions and the sometimes invisible labour required to keep all of it moving.
And perhaps this is why Zeitz’s presence at FNB Art Joburg felt larger than the physical size of its booth.
Johannesburg offered Zeitz MOCAA a useful place to test that idea. Zeitz MOCAA, for its part, did not simply bring Cape Town to Johannesburg. It brought the museum into the conversation.
And, for a few days, at least, the museum left the building.
* Unathi Kondile is a retired newspaperman and the Founding Editor of Independent Media's I'solezwe lesiXhosa.