On Homecomings, Liberation Architecture, and the Myth of the Blank Slate
Zanele Muholi returns to South Africa. MoMA asks what a building says about freedom. In Nairobi, an artist refuses erasure.
This week, the African art world has its eyes on three cities at once. In Cape Town, Zanele Muholi has finally brought a major retrospective home to the country whose Black queer lives they have spent twenty years documenting. In New York, MoMA has opened the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the architects who built the physical reality of African independence. And in Nairobi, Peterson Kamwathi’s most important exhibition to date is asking what it means when someone tries to convince you that your history is a blank slate. Each story, in its own way, is about what refuses to be erased.
Kanye Nawe: Zanele Muholi Comes Home
After years of exhibiting in London, Paris, New York, and Amsterdam, after the Tate Modern and the Hasselblad Award and the Venice Biennale, Zanele Muholi has finally brought a major solo exhibition home.
Kanye Nawe, meaning “with you,” “alongside you,” or “oneness” in isiZulu, opened at Southern Guild Cape Town on July 18 and runs through September 10. It occupies the entire gallery at Silo 5 in the V&A Waterfront and gathers more than twenty years of Muholi’s practice in one space: the landmark community portrait project Faces and Phases, now celebrating its 20th anniversary; intimate photographs from Only Half the Picture, Being, Mo(u)rning, LiZa, and ZaVa; new additions to the self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness); and new bronze sculptures that extend Muholi’s visual activism into three dimensions. Entry is free.
The timing is layered with meaning. The exhibition opens in the month of Muholi’s birthday. It arrives fifty years after the Soweto uprising, thirty years after South Africa’s democratic transition, and in the same year Muholi received the Hasselblad Award, the world’s most prestigious prize in photography. “Coming home this year feels profound,” Muholi has said. “South Africa is remembering the Women’s March of 1956, fifty years since Soweto, and thirty years of democracy. At the same time I celebrate twenty years of Faces and Phases and my own birthday month. Kanye Nawe is about being together, about oneness. I am grateful to share this work with my people.”
For South African audiences, particularly Black queer South Africans whose lives and faces fill Muholi’s work, this is not simply an art exhibition. It is a reckoning and a reunion. Muholi has spent two decades bearing witness to a community that has faced violence, erasure, and invisibility within the country that is supposedly their own. To bring that witness home, to hang it on walls in Cape Town and invite people in for free, is an act of defiant care.
We featured Muholi in Issue 2, in the context of their Hasselblad Award. Kanye Nawe is the culmination of everything that award recognised. Go if you can.
Artist Spotlight: Demas Nwoko, The Architect Who Refused to Copy
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa on July 5, one name in the exhibition demanded particular attention: Demas Nwoko.
Born in 1935 in Idumuje-Ugboko, Nigeria, Nwoko is one of the most original minds in the history of African architecture and design. He trained as a fine artist at the Zaria Art School in the 1950s, where he was a founding member of the Zaria Art Society, a group of young Nigerian artists who argued that authentic African art must grow from African cultural traditions rather than simply imitating European modernism. He has no formal architecture training. After Zaria he studied theatre architecture and stage design in Paris on scholarship, returned to Nigeria to lecture at the University of Ibadan’s School of Drama, and came to architecture through his work as an artist and designer, describing himself not as an architect but as an “artist-designer.”
His most celebrated work is the Dominican Institute in Ibadan, commissioned in 1970 and still in use: a complex of buildings that draws on Yoruba spatial principles, local materials, and the Nigerian climate to create something that looks like nothing else in the world. Thick earthen walls, natural ventilation, interior courtyards, and forms that seem to have grown from the ground rather than been imported. It is a building that answers the colonial architecture of West Africa not by rejecting modernity but by insisting that African knowledge and African materials are themselves modern.
Nwoko is now in his nineties and still working. His recognition has been slow in coming, partly because his buildings resist the photogenic simplicity that makes architecture famous in the global media, and partly because his insistence on African self-determination has not always fit comfortably into the narratives that Western institutions prefer. The MoMA exhibition is a meaningful, if overdue, correction.
Deep Roots: The Buildings That Built the Nations
Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, which opened at MoMA on July 5 and runs through January 2, 2027, is the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the architecture of post-independence West Africa. It is also, quietly, one of the most politically charged exhibitions in New York right now.
The premise is straightforward: when seventeen African nations gained independence in 1960, the year historians call the Year of Africa, their new governments faced the challenge of building a physical reality to match their political aspirations. Schools, universities, civic centres, housing projects, hotels, trade fair pavilions, and national assembly buildings all had to be designed from scratch, often simultaneously, in countries whose colonial infrastructure had been built to serve extraction rather than citizenship. The architects who rose to that challenge, working across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo, produced a body of work that has been almost entirely absent from the canon of 20th-century modernist architecture.
MoMA’s exhibition gathers approximately 350 objects: drawings, models, archival photographs, and newly commissioned images by photographer François-Xavier Gbré, whose lens finds in these buildings the traces of aspiration, wear, and ongoing life. The architects featured include Jean Léon of Côte d’Ivoire, Cheikh Ngom of Senegal, John Owusu Addo and Vic Adegbite of Ghana, and Demas Nwoko of Nigeria, alongside architects from Yugoslavia, Italy, and France who brought their own modernist languages into dialogue with African contexts and clients.
What makes the exhibition timely is not just its historical argument. It is the question it implies about the present: if the architecture of independence was a form of political imagination, what does it mean that so many of those buildings are now decaying, demolished, or forgotten? Who bears responsibility for that forgetting, and what would it mean to remember?
On the Global Stage: Nairobi, Memory, and a Mentor’s Legacy
At the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Peterson Kamwathi’s Tabula Rasa has been running since April and continues through August 23. It is his first institutional solo exhibition in Nairobi, and it is extraordinary.
Kamwathi works across drawing, collage, print, sculpture, video installation, and site-specific wall drawing. His subject, across more than two decades of practice, has been the human group: the crowd, the queue, the collective, the anonymous silhouette repeated until it becomes something between a portrait and a system. In Tabula Rasa, he extends this inquiry into the politics of identity itself, taking on the 17th-century philosophical concept of the blank slate and asking what it means to apply the idea of blankness to people, to cultures, to entire continents. His answer, built from densely packed drawings and rhythmically ordered figures, is that the blank slate is a fiction, and a violent one: a tool of erasure dressed up as philosophy.
The works were made between 2022 and 2026, and they carry within them the weight of everything that has happened across Africa in those four years. They are not agitprop. They are patient, formally rigorous, and deeply felt. The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute’s commitment to showing this work, in its first major institutional presentation in his home city, is exactly the kind of investment in local artistic infrastructure that the continent needs more of.
The exhibition also carries a more personal weight. Patrick Mukabi, the beloved Nairobi artist, teacher, and mentor who founded Dust Depo Studio and spent decades opening art to young people who had no other access to it, died on April 23, 2026. Kamwathi has spoken of Mukabi as a friend and mentor who taught him to see art beyond the paint and pencil. Readers of this newsletter may also remember Mukabi from Issue 5, where we featured Musah Mwakelemu, one of the many artists who found their way to practice through Mukabi’s extraordinary generosity.
His death was a genuine loss for East African art. His legacy is the dozens of working artists who would not be working without him. Tabula Rasa is, in part, a tribute to that kind of patient, unglamorous, transformative work.
Museum Feature: Southern Guild, Cape Town and New York
The gallery hosting Zanele Muholi’s homecoming is itself one of the most interesting institutions in the African art world right now.
Southern Guild was founded in Cape Town in 2008 with a focus on design, craft, and the porous boundary between them: the chairs, vessels, textiles, and objects that do not fit neatly into the Western distinction between fine art and applied art. Over the past decade, the gallery has expanded its programme to include painting, sculpture, and photography, while maintaining its commitment to work that engages seriously with materials, process, and cultural specificity.
The gallery now has a space in New York in addition to its Cape Town home at Silo 5 in the V&A Waterfront, and has been represented at Art Basel Miami Beach. It represents Muholi alongside ceramicist Zizipho Poswa, whose large-scale female figurative sculptures in clay have brought her significant international attention.
What distinguishes Southern Guild is the seriousness with which it treats context. A work made in Cape Town carries a history that gets lost if it is simply transplanted into a white cube in New York and sold as exotic novelty. Southern Guild’s programming consistently resists that loss. Kanye Nawe, free to enter, filling the entire gallery, made available to the South African audiences Muholi’s work has always been for, is the clearest expression of that commitment this year.
Southern Guild, Silo 5, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town. southernguild.com
Want to explore more institutions across the continent? Africa.com’s Museums of Africa guide is your country-by-country companion to heritage collections, contemporary art spaces, and cultural institutions from Cairo to Cape Town. Explore the full guide at africa.com
A Final Word
A gallery in Cape Town filled with twenty years of witness. A museum in New York asking what a building says about freedom. A Nairobi artist whose densely packed drawings refuse the myth of the blank slate. And the memory of a man who spent a lifetime giving other people access to their own creativity.
The African art world this week is not one story. It is many, running simultaneously, across cities that rarely appear in the same sentence. That is precisely why this newsletter exists.
We will be back next week with more.