Structures – Worldmaking at JCAF from 31 May to 15 November 2025

Posted on 6 June 202528 June 2025

Structures – Worldmaking at JCAF from 31 May to 15 November 2025

JCAF has ‘done it again’. Each exhibition seems to outdo the last one. Structures is the second in a trilogy of exhibitions around the theme of Worldmaking. Ecospheres (the natural world) wowed Jozi’s cultural audience last year, and this exhibition Structures (the built environment) will do the same again. JCAF has a lot to live up to in 2026 with Futures (the techno-future), the last in this series! When visiting we were fortunate enough to have 3 of the artists present to speak about their work: Stephen Hobbs, Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk and Molemo Moiloa.

Special Projects

When Clive Kellner, the curator of JCAF and this show, saw a small work by Stephen Hobbs, a work entitled Thinking Constructions with Cable Ties 2013 (… the cable ties give a clue as to its scale …), Clive said to Stephen “ I want that … BIG”. And so it came to pass and Stephen built mnara (meaning tower in Swahili) as a special project for this exhibition. Layered with multiple references: from Russian Constructivist sculpture and its “inside-outness”, to the time-lapse between the construction and completion of buildings, to makeshift construction materials, to the ephemerality of these temporary materials, this work becomes, in Stephen’s words, “a spectacle of the unfinished”. Shadows and cast reflectsions amplify this marvellous structure marking the entrance to the exhibition “Structures’.

Stephen Hobbs, mnara (tower) (2025), in the JCAF courtyard. Photo Graham De Lacy.

Inside, after adjusting our eyes to the now expected darkened, cool, hallowed interior space, we turned to the 2^nd special project on the entrance wall. Rebecca Potterton’s 2025 mural, Marks of Home, comprises 45 exquisitely drawn images of “structures” (architectural, household, natural) from different cultures, histories and traditions in the Global South.

Curatorial Concepts

Structures, as with the other JCAF exhibitions, has been meticulously curated with both an intellectual rigour and a conceptual tightness which challenges the viewer without overwhelming. The minimalist display, the careful lighting, and the ‘breathing-space’ given to the installations, preserves and, dare I say, even increases, the aesthetic sensibility and symbolic resonance of the works. There is a welcome informative and generous folding guide of the exhibition which lays out the interesting themes, concepts and curatorial structure of this exhibition. There are three sections: Situatedness, Typologies and Infrastructures. All intersect with different styles and histories in the built environment, which can be (or perhaps SHOULD be seen) as all informing each other: vernacular, Modernist and Post-Colonialist.

Section 1 Situatedness

Algerian born **Kader Attia’**s remarkable installation reconstructs a representation of the ancient Algerian city of Ghardaïa, out of 300kg plus of couscous … yes that’s right .. couscous… every bit of it! Placed in conversation with photographs on the walll of Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon, this work signals the often-unacknowledged influence of North African architecture on its French colonisers.

**Kamyar Bineshtarigh**, Iranian born but CapeTown based, works with the idea of place in a very different way. Panel Beaters III (2023) made with wall paint, auto enamel and motor oil on a hessian backing, refers to a past iteration of the artist’s studio as a panel-beaters’ workshop, the walls of which act as palimpsests of their past history.

**Hajra Waheed**’s small-scale glazed porcelain sculptures entitled *This is Not a Door, Just a Sense There Might Be One at Some Point 1-2* (2019) reflects on the artist’s place as somebody who spent her early childhood in Saudi Arabia but is now based in Montreal. Interestingly, while the doors suggest a certain precarious uncertainty and a sense of the unknown, the intimacy of the small scale, the title, and the poignant treatment of form, all point to a sense of opportunity and hope rather than one of fear and anxiety.

The 3 exquisite photographs by the Franco-Tunisian **Jellel Gasteli**, from the 1996 Série Blanche, comprise the 4th part of this section on place or “Situatedness”. They are described in the exhibition info folder as capturing ‘the intense pure spirit of place’ … ‘a contemplative stillness in monochrome’ where ‘light is the protagonist’. They are utterly beautiful

Section 2 Stuctures

Of course no exhibition dealing with Structures could ignore David Goldblatt’s iconic black and white photography. His works and those of Kiluanji KI Henda‘s on the opposite wall speak in perfect counterpoint with each other. Watch out for the careful placement of these 2 sets of photographs.

**Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk** is an architect who established Matri-Arch(tecture), a group of 26 intergenerational diasporic women, four of whom have worked on the interactive installation *Building Africa: The State of Things* (2023). Here, viewers are encouraged to think about their reactions to, and experiences of, two iconic public South African buildings: the Union buildings (a photo on the wall) and the Constitutional Court (the subject of each book on the podiums).

Each of the five podiums has a book relating to a space at Constitution Hill such as: Museum, Garden, Prison, Amphitheatre, etc. Viewers are encouraged not only to stand at these podiums (a podium is usually a site of didactic authority), but also to write comments in any of the books. Each book may be lifted (it is an interactive display) to reveal an architectural box space below with a small sculpture. This image shows the space below the prison book which includes a small sculpture of a cell with photo backdrops of the solitary confinement cells in Section 4 at the Constitution Hill prison site.

I started chatting to a fellow viewer who, it transpired, is a very proud mother. She is Mkateko Mboweni-de Klerk, mother of one of the artists who made this installation: Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk.

The 4th work in the Infrastuctures section is another large installation orginally from 1979. Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s PN28 “Nas Quebredas”, is a walk-in installation invoking a structure in a Rio De Janiero favela.

Section 3 Typologies

The final two works of this exhibition are 2 large scale installations. Igshaan Adams‘ Gebedswolke 2025 is a site-specific installation. This installation, made of wires, beads, thread, linoleum, “traces the informal paths, often referred to as “desire lines”, created by residents of Langa, Bontheuwel and Heideveld. These paths push back against imposed boundaries and respond to the lack of safe pedestrian routes in apartheid-era urban planning”. This made me think of De Certeau, the French scholar. In his chapter “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life, he asserts that the ‘city’ is brought into being by official bodies and large institutions which produce systems like street grids, planned urban spaces, precincts, maps etc. And it is these strategies which organize the city’s spaces into a coherent, intelligible and coherent whole. But, by contrast, he argues, the walker moves in ways that are haphazard and irregular, seldom adhering to the plans of organizing bodies. So, for example, pedestrians might take shortcuts which will ignore the strategic grid of the streets. Or their line of vision (focusing on shop fronts or an interesting activity) will not necessarily cohere with the planned sight line of an urban planner. Adams’ work embodies this with his invocation of “desire lines” which mark the routes that community members take, and the paths they make, in their everyday work and leisure movements, overseen by protective and aspirational “prayer clouds”.

Installation view showing Igshaan Adams, *Gebedswolke* (2025). © Igshaan Adams. In the background MADEYOULOOK, Dinokana (2024). Photo Graham De Lacy.

MADEYOULook, Dinokana, is a collaboration between Molemo Moilia and Nare Mokgothoa and was commissioned by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture for the 2024 Venice Biennale. So it’s a fabulous treat to experience it reinstalled back here in Jozi. Dinokana (a village in North-West Province) speaks of, and to, communities’ relationship to land, to their historical disposession if this land, to the return to ownership of this once fertile land, and to ways of resuscitating productive farming once again through water management. The work comprises a 3 part installation of:

a “landscape”: representations of the historical terraced hillsides of the farmlands around Dinokana. There are traces of these terraces still evident in the landscape. Dinokana is the home village of Molemo Moiloa’s father, so the familial connections give this work even greater profoundnness
a “rainscape”: hanging strands of “resurrection” plant clippings. The ‘resurrection’ plant earns its name from its instant revival as soon as the rains come
a 20 minute long “soundscape” comprising women’s songs about rain and harvest (from an historical archive), natural sounds from the environment, and clippings of interviews with community members

Installation view of *Structures* exhibition, in the foreground *MADEYOULOOK, Dinokana* (2024). © and courtesy MADEYOULOOK. Commissioned by the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture for La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Photo Graham De Lacy.

If there is one exhibition that you see in 2025, make sure it is this one. There is an excellent exhibition information poster and there is loads of digital information available on-site. You do need to book 010 900 2204 or info@jcaf.org.za. Tours are free and last an hour. And it seems that June is already almost booked out.