AVA Gallery
10.10 - 13.11.2025

Joburg-based artist Tshepo Sizwe Phokojoe has brought his work to Cape Town for his latest solo show, ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy,’ curated by Mzoxolo Vimba. Vimba leads us through the series of Phokojoe’s work, arranged into a narrative thread along the passageway of AVA’s Mezzanine Gallery. At the entrance, we are greeted by a Coke bottle hanging from the ceiling, a nod to the 1980 movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy¹The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) tells the story of a group of bushmen living a caricatured idyllic life in the Kalahari desert when a Coke bottle falls from the sky (discarded from an aeroplane). They think it is a gift from the Gods, but the disruption soon causes unrest in their society and the protagonist, !Xi (played by Nǃxau ǂToma) undertakes to take the Coke bottle on a journey to discard it at the end of the world. On the way he meets Andrew Steyn, a kindly Afrikaans biologist working in Botswana and they end up collaborating to rescue a damsel school teacher and a group of local children who have been taken hostage by a group of guerrillas led by the brutish Sam Bodi. !Xi uses his tracking and hunting skills to aid in the capture of the guerillas after which he continues his journey to deposit the bottle on a cliff’s edge in the Drakensberg mountains, and return home. The guerrilla group, violent and buffooning, read as a thinly veiled caricature of SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) and MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) revolutionaries. At the time the SADF (South African Defense Force) was recruiting San hunters in Namibia, through coercion and sometimes force, to work as trackers to aid in the capture of SWAPO activists. While the film presents a picture of the San society as idyllic, undisturbed, so untouched that a Coke bottle is seen as a mystery from the ancestors, in reality by 1980 San communities were being forced by the SADF into farm labour and military service. At the end of the film the well meaning Afrikaner tries to pay !Xi, who is confused as he has never seen money before. This fiction rings sharp when you watch it with the knowledge that director Jamie Uys initially paid Nǃxau ǂToma $300 for his performance (the production budget was $5 million). The Militarisation of the San. 2025. Khwattu.org Judy Klemesrud, 1985. THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY’ – A TRULY INTERNATIONAL HIT. New York Times., which has given the exhibition its title. Walking on, the first two works, entitled Iveza’ndlebe 1 and 2, are made of brown hessian: stitched sculptural forms spill, uncontained from their frames, and cast a shadow work beneath them. Walking on, we are struck with red. In Balance (The point of intersection), Phokojoe has made sculptural circles in red and brown that collide, the two colours sewn together and pulled out into loose threads. Following on is a series of works where the red and brown hessian seem to tussle with each other for space in the frame. At the end of the line, we come to rest at The Head and The Tail, where the red and brown hessian have been separated into two distinct colours. The unravelling collision has been resolved. 

Tshepo Phokojoe, Divergence, 2025

In conversation, the artist tells me that this beast of an exhibition is like a dog chasing its tail. While from the outside, the exhibition feels tightly resolved, Phokojoe says it is an unfinished chapter in a longer story. Phokojoe laughs as he says that maybe, “moving in retrospect,” he will come to understand the work. 

He tells me about growing up in Soweto and feeling like an outsider, an “amalgamation of something different”, his names in Sotho, Zulu and Pedi. “Now I say I am Sowetan […] Soweto doesn’t belong to anyone”. It offers placehood through displacement. Soweto’s history is archived in his work’s materiality. The Sakmen were the first residents of Soweto, building homes in hessian. In the 1930s, when the South-Western Township was being formed through land displacement strategies that would build the foundation of Apartheid, James ‘Sofasonke’ Mpanza²James ‘Sofasonke’ Mpanza (1889 – 1970) was a seminal activist and community leader in Sowetho. The Orlando Pirates, first called The Orlando Club, were nicknamed the Pirates after Mpanza. led a group of displaced people to form Masakeng (the place of hessian sacks)³Tshenolo Mokgele, 2011. Celebrating Soweto’s Heritage. Brand South Africa.. 

This question of home as a shifting space, something between body and place, threads through his practice: “At first, it was personal, but now it’s about Africa as a whole”. On a residency in Nigeria earlier this year, Phokojoe began researching connections between Southern and Western Africa and the Bantu expansion. This research led him to revisit his “second favourite” childhood movie: The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980). The film is like a slapstick feverdream of 1980s South Africa, with Apartheid and the Border War crudely cut out. Tabling critique of the problematic film seen in retrospect, he returns to a childhood resonance with the protagonist who journeys as an outsider from his home to displacement and back again. His life disrupted by the Coke bottle that falls from the sky. 

Tshepo Phokojoe, Iveza’ndlebe II, 2025

Our conversation continues and Phokojoe tells me he is reading string theory. I’m unsurprised that the expansive web of reference in his work would lead him to quantum physics, and to the Gods. Every thread of reference winds back into the knot. Abstraction lends itself to this kind of plurality. In our conversation, Phokojoe says the “benefit of abstraction [is that] the reference is just a thought”. Guided by Vimba’s curatorial aids: the hanging Coke bottle, the title, and the exhibition texts’ reference to the Sakmen, the viewer can reach their fingertips into the lattice of Phokojoe’s thought. Whereas abstraction can sometimes obfuscate an artist’s references, Vimba steps in to curate a deepened understanding of the work. 

Artists need curators and curators need artists. Talking to them, and hearing the tender way Vimba describes their collaboration and his work as a sounding board for Phokojoe’s practice, I am struck by the tangible influence of the curator in a conversation spanning years. Vimba could be described as a conduit as well as a curator. He tells me about Phokojoe’s studio process with a warm, familiar tone that I diffidently read as love—where, for two critical practitioners, love is dialogue, debate, thought. I ask where they met and they laugh sheepishly, telling me it was over beers; in their conversations, they found that they were both wrestling the same questions. Vimba tells me, “asking questions is more important than coming up with answers”. And this exhibition has certainly left me many.  

The dog is chasing its tail, and it feels impossible to hold Phokojoe’s process without thinking in simultaneous temporalities. The artist is in the work, and the vinyl name on the wall. The artist is a child in Soweto, watching a favourite movie. The artist is in Johannesburg, meeting a curator who will transcribe his work for years. The artist is in Nigeria connecting histories. The artist is in studio reading string theory. The artist is in Cape Town, finding the red hessian that will spill into his work in brown. The artist is sitting on the AVA couch, telling me, “Nothing belongs to just one person”. 

This review was produced as a part of the AVA Art Writing Workshop, facilitated by Keely Shinners. This project was made possible thanks to the support by the City of Cape Town.