Home
04.07 - 19.08.2025
Nestled within the delicate and sobering issue of Cape Town City’s housing crisis and the persistent legacies of spatial apartheid, we find the enigmatic exhibition ‘HOME’, staged at Wolff Architects in Bo-Kaap. The art and mutual aid organisation Artists4Equity, led by Hannah Mutanda Kaniki, in collaboration with Wolff Architects, which has consistently been preoccupied with the urban development and preservation of historically marginalised communities within Cape Town, has come together under the curatorial stewardship of artist Mikhailia Petersen. Both Petersen and Kaniki have been working closely with Reclaim The City, a social movement which campaigns for affordable housing in the city. What has recently become a concern for the movement is the occupation of Ahmed Kathrada House, a former nursing home in Green Point, in the form of a brutalist building which sits directly opposite the leafy, vibey and predominantly white and tourist patron-going location that is the Oranjezicht City Farm Market. Intending to raise funds for the occupation of AKH which houses nurses, teachers, domestic workers, and employees across the waterfront and greater city, the exhibition, ‘HOME’, not only opens the enquiry of what conditions are needed to facilitate the decolonial work of reclaiming space and place for the viability of building homes, but also welcomes artists into the fold as the housing crisis become a greater concern in the city. Through the social and cultural work of organisations like Artists4Equity and Reclaim The City, it has become evident that issues of housing deserve necessary confrontation across different communities and individuals invested in the social, political and geographical reclamation of the city.
Installation View | Home, 2025. Pictured Alka Dass, Bite the apple Eve, 2025, Onesimo Bam, Mother, 2024 and Haroon Gunn-Salie, Half full, 2012–2025
There is a growing interest amongst contemporary artists to turn to the home, or conception of home, to produce work which either restores or disrupts these personal archival repositories as sites of knowledge production. One of the first works I viewed is Onesimo Bam’s work of a garment turned sculpture through the material of painted felt entitled Mother (2024). The work disrupts what we might conceive as domestic archives as we move between the intangible, the oral, and the material, all of which capture our urge to find and crystallise what symbolises the home.
An aspect that is easy to ignore within these reparative attempts is the persistent precarity of home itself and those who occupy it. Ushered in by the larger economic destabilisation of a housing crisis within our cities, across the continent, and globally, experts are fast concluding that home ownership and land security are becoming more unattainable as the inequality gap deepens. How, then, does this grim reality figure within the local context of a psycho-geography that still bears the scars of apartheid sanctioned forced removals, and city planning that relegated people of colour to the far peripheries of our central business districts and white suburbia?
Nabeeha Mohamed, Shelf, 2025
In an interview with Kaniki, she explains that the intention for the exhibition, which includes an auction component, is to “transform creative labour into political tools and develop an ongoing mutual aid dynamic amongst artists and larger communities, especially communities that are invested in decolonial frameworks for undoing the legacies of spatial apartheid.” It is no surprise that many of the artists who are included have, in some form, engaged with the political movement of Reclaim the City. For instance, Nabeeha Mohamed, whose offering is an intimate rendering of the South African home’s kitchen cabinet in the work Shelf (2025), with a paper collage of a can of koo beans, a lit candle and a pack of Lions matches beside a hung mug. Similarly, there is the inclusion of artists who, throughout their practice, have been absorbed by questions of spatial inequality, contested land, and, in turn, the fragility of the histories which occupy such dislocation. Haroon Gunn-Salie’s practice comes to mind as we observe scattered about, the subtle placement of enamel bowls, which have collected rainwater in the site-specific and temporally mediated work Half Full (2012-2015).
Michaela Younge, While You Were Sleeping, 2025.
Concerned with areas which have been affected by forced removals, Gunn-Salie’s work invests in site-specific interventions in historically contested spaces like District Six. The work also reminds us how developments of gentrification and neo-liberal capitalist agendas render areas like Bo-Kaap vulnerable to communal dislocation within this contemporary moment. The historical significance of Bo-Kaap is important to amplify as it was one of the only areas which was able to sustain the homes of Cape Malay and Cape Muslim families after the emancipation of enslaved peoples in 1834 and during apartheid. It is within the context of locations like Bo-Kaap, and buildings like the Ahmed Kathrada House that the political and social necessity of an exhibition like ‘HOME’ becomes evermore evident.
Haroon Gunn-Salie, Half full, 2012–2025
When speaking to Petersen about the curatorial framework, she divulges the unique set of circumstances which come with curating a show which began as an open call to artists, and nursing the core anxiety of not knowing what works would eventually arrive. When traversing the space, this fact never comes to mind, as there are a multitude of organic moments. For instance, the polished yellow floor seems to find a connection with several works which also carry a similar tone of boldness. Tonal connections are found through Petersen’s photograph I am Themba (2024), which she shot as part of a mental health awareness initiative in Langa, to Kyle Hendri Strydom’s muted yellow ceramic To Burn is to Let Go (2023), and Sahlah Davids’ elaborate bead forms Unpicking Memories (2025) which balances bright yellows with darker browns and oranges. Davids’s work also enjoys a curatorial altar as you are called to walk about a few steps to reach the work encased within an indented section of the wall. The altar becomes fitting as Davids regularly explores themes of religion in her work as she finds expression for her own heritage as part of the Cape Muslim community. This offers us an alternative conception of home, not only linked to the familial, but also closely related to cultural lineages which construct community, and in turn construct alternative spaces of homing. Thero Makepe’s inclusion is another accessing of home not only through his mother, but through her strong communal ties to the Anglican Church in their home of Botswana, seen in his photographic work Merapelo II (Anglican Holy Cathedral, Gaborone) (2019). His mother, consumed by shadow as she sits, looks to the light which comes through the window, yet again, we capture the tonal continuance of a bright yellow which connects the work to the greater space of the gallery floor.
Mishal Weston, Blaauw Bones, 2024
Beyond the noble intention of raising funds for the occupation of AKH through the exhibition and the auction, it is evident that themes of home, land and legacies of historical dislocation find root in the work of the artists exhibited. Davids’s own background, having graduated with a Master’s degree in Urban Design from the University of Cape Town, is not only concerned with the domestic and the spiritual home but also how the home figures within the greater structures of our communities, those that have faced violences of dislocation, erasure, and removal. Land and histories of excavation are neatly captured by Mishal Weston’s found fossilised stone entitled Blaauw Bones (2024), which reminds one of a time millennia ago when our ancestors too made their mark on how they came to construct homes. The work is coupled with softer images of home in While You Were Sleeping (2025) as Michaela Younge welcomes us into a small bedroom through her wool on felt work, two lovers under the sheets with their cat chasing a mouse within the confines of their humble abode.
As both the artists and the collaborators within this exhibition work to undo the systemic operations which render the ability to build and sustain homes in our city centres impossible, it reminds us as viewers to remain aware. Beyond engaging and acquiring art, we must remain sensitive to the neo-colonial legacies which persist in the cities we occupy, some of us only being able to occupy such spaces through our labour, and for the privileged few through being able to be at leisure and reprieve in city-adjacent suburban centres. Through ‘HOME’, it becomes evident that as our personal and communal constructions of the domestic continue to clash with the political reality of the public, certain questions persist. Who is allowed to occupy certain spaces? In what way are they allowed to occupy and engage with those spaces? And who controls the access, acquisition and occupation of said contested space?
Mikhailia Petersen, I am Themba, 2024
