Cape Town’s art scene is pulling out all the stops this Heritage weekend

Unathi Kondile

25 SEP 2026, 11:00

8 min read

“This was Elton John’s car! And now it is mine! I shipped it to Cape Town about 10 years ago... I didn’t buy the car directly from Elton, but he owned it in the 1980s...” said Beezy Bailey as we stood in front of their maroon 1960s Bentley S2 Continental Flying Spur.

We were outside the opening of the "Bring on the Dancing Trees" exhibition at Everard Read Cape Town.

Hurry along to the gallery if you want to see this latest body of work. It closes this weekend.

Beezy Bailey is arguably one of South Africa’s best-known artists. It is a name I knew long before I had even seen their work. He is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and had his first solo exhibition in 1986 at the Art Show Gallery in London. Still going strong.

The Talent of Beezy Bailey

Beezy’s new work at Everard did not immediately give itself up to me. I am a sucker for form and aesthetics, whereas Beezy is more interested in abstraction, the subconscious and the Anthropocene.

The paintings are not clear, nor are they vivid things; they inhabit a very expressionist, Monet-esque territory where you are never quite sure whether you are looking at the image or the idea of one.

“Like Picasso, I say that it is not for me to explain the contents of my work; this is for the viewer to do. Each of my works is a frozen dream,” explained Beezy.

My favourite pieces were "The Four Horses of the Apocalypse", "Where Do We Run To", "The Last Bird Migration" and, of course, the skinny, ginormous "Dancing Lovers" bronze sculpture, priced at R1.2 million.

And here is the thing about Beezy: their work sells.

Whilst at Everard, do cross over to its CIRCA side and check out Nigel Mullins’s paintings. My word!

Blank

Not far from the Waterfront, in Woodstock, make a turn onto Lewin Street, where Blank Projects gallery is. There you will be greeted by brilliant conceptual sculptures by Kemang Wa Lehulere. "Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink" is the title of the exhibition. It runs until 24 October.

Many, many years ago [read: 2007] there was a collective called the "Gugulective", housed in Ta Mlamli’s shebeen in Gugulethu. It included Kemang Wa Lehulere, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Ziphozenkosi Dayile, Dathini Mzayiya, Loyiso Qanya, Themba Tsotsi, Lonwabo Kilani (RIP), Unathi Sigenu (RIP) and Ta Mlamli himself.

Every time I see Kemang, or one of his works, I am reminded of that time. What a time!

My feeble mind back then found their ideas far too complex and unnecessarily deep. I once asked one of its members to try to stick to plain English. The audience, I argued, is not always made up of art academics.

Be that as it may, I have since come to realise that they were probably far ahead of their time. Their languaging had a place.

Kemang continues in that tradition, using found objects and salvaged materials to create environments and events that situate personal memories within, and in contrast to, collective narratives. School desks, tyres, chalkboards, ceramic dogs and just about any other material is not spared. The ordinary becomes less ordinary in his hands.

For this exhibition, he returns to salvaged school desks, dismantling and reconfiguring them. The desks carry histories of segregated schooling, discipline and memory. He turns them into something else entirely. Beauty. Form. Art.

I particularly liked the circular "Kgotla" piece. It stands out, literally and figuratively. Thank goodness, it is made from salvaged school desks rather than clothes irons. That would’ve ruffled feathers. The wood already looks like irons.

I was also, and I am sure every other visitor will too, drawn to "The Ground is Emotional", a sound and sculpture installation made from salvaged school desks, speakers and enamel paint. It tells a story and speaks volumes about this country’s past.

"Love Letters Written in Poisonous Ink" closes on 24 October. Do also check out Kamva Matius’s "Dirge" new body of work at the back of this same gallery. His work took me back to the Eastern Cape and even includes a surreal image of the late Xhosa King Zwelonke Mpendulo Sigcawu. Look out for the horse eye titled "Uyandoyika Ungandijongi Nje?" it will hold you in one place.

Southern Guild

And then there was Southern Guild, a gallery that has established itself as one of the more compelling spaces in the city’s contemporary art landscape. Its exhibitions have a consistency and intellectual rigour that keep drawing me back. I don’t think I have missed any of its openings this year.

True to form, last Friday, 18 September, it opened two impressive solo exhibitions: "Every Buried Sun" by Alexandra Karakashian and "Kala" by Simphiwe Buthelezi. Both run until 12 November.

I have known Alexandra Karakashian since her Michaelis School of Fine Art student days. I tutored her at some stage and can still remember her graduate exhibition work.

You can sometimes tell which students are going to go far. But then again, with Michaelis, not going far after art school is just a choice you make.

These days Karakashian has acquired quite a penchant for abstraction and seems determined to make making art as difficult as possible. I mean, who uses engine oil, oil paint and textiles all at the same time? Painting on aluminium even.

Such processes force her to contend with absorption, seeping, staining and evaporation. And it takes time.

“I can initiate a process, but the material has its own behaviour, its own history and, in some sense, its own spirit. There is a constant negotiation between what I intend and what the material reveals. I spend a lot of time looking, waiting and responding. Often the most important moments in a work are things I could never have predetermined,” said Alexandra Karakashian.

Her 220 x 150cm "Buried Light" series of paintings (I, II and III) caught my attention almost immediately. How one manages to use oil paint on aluminium and achieve such visually arresting abstract images is beyond me.

I spotted a possibly Jake Aikman inspired piece titled "Laid Down", made with used engine oil, oil, turpentine and oxide on linen. You will stare at it.

And that is the thing about Alexandra’s latest body of work: it demands attention. The artist says they are more interested in how people spend time with the work.

“If viewers leave with anything, I hope it is not certainty but maybe a deeper sensitivity: the feeling that some things ask to be witnessed rather than resolved, and that looking can sometimes be more important than arriving at an answer. I hope that the viewer leaves with more questions than answers.”

The gallery’s first half is dedicated to Simphiwe Buthelezi's solo, "Kala" [to weigh in Zulu].

Rarely does beauty arrive in such simple or commonplace materials. Think reed mats, seed and glass beads, natural fibres, clay and other found earth matter such as Atlantic sand. You can tell that each work on show was a labour-intensive affair. That she pulled it off in under two months at Southern Guild’s Silo District studios is quite something.

“The process was incredibly labour-intensive and demanded a kind of stillness that was difficult to adjust to at first. I worked with clay for the first time, making fired earthenware beads by hand and incorporating them into several of the sculptures. There was something about the repetition and slowness of these processes that allowed me to settle into the work again,” said Simphiwe Buthelezi.

That said, upon entering Simphiwe’s space, you will be drawn to a monumental sphere titled "Mhlaba". "Mhlaba" is earth or land, depending on context. The work is suspended above a small pool of water, its surface layered with tactile constellations built from cut segments of traditional handwoven reed mats (icansi) and Atlantic sand.

The "Abacus" also stands out. It is an extensive wall-hung installation made with ebonised, handmade clay beads that shift across a series of open contour lines. An abacus that has apparently had enough of counting.

My favourite piece, no doubt, was "Umkhaphi", made from treated reed mats, glass beads, glass, metal bells and resin on board. The detailing and process are enough to have you wondering “How?” for a while.

Simphiwe is interested in measuring what refuses to be calculated: hope, memory, collective dignity, spiritual inheritance and the distance between who we are and who we might yet become.

How does one measure such things? With materiality, I suppose, if "Kala" is anything to go by. The exhibition itself asks not simply how we measure the world, but what we choose to measure.

P.S.: There are still some amazing Zanele Muholi works on show somewhere at the far back section of Southern Guild. Don’t miss them.

P.P.S.: Go and see what a R34 million artwork looks like. Iziko South African National Gallery is opening its "Modernism and its Discontents" exhibition on Heritage Day, 24 September. The exhibition explores a century of South African art and is presented in conversation with Irma Stern’s celebrated "The Arab Priest", bought by the Qatar Museums Authority at Bonhams in 2011 for £3.044 million (R34 Million in 2011 currency conversions at the time). On show, right on our doorstep.