On view from 2 November 2024 until 28 February 2025

MOCAA Art Club (M A C) is a BMW Centre for Art Education programme for teenagers from the diverse localities of Cape Town. This year brought 16 members from Bonteheuwel, Delft, Khayelitsha, Philippi, Mitchel’s Plain and Nyanga to interact in an environment that promotes social cohesion. Using their collective zeal for art-making to engender criticality and visual literacy, members explored a myriad of contemporary artistic practices in a series of technical and conceptual workshops.

For five months, members gathered every second Saturday to participate in sessions intended to observe, reflect, discuss, make and write. The year’s theme, “identity in space”, served as a conceptual framework for examining personal experiences and how they intersect with a broader social and spatial context. In alignment with the BMW Centre for Art Education’s objective to translate exhibitions into learning resources, they responded to the museum’s permanent collections, SALA and Selections from the Collection; as well as Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting (at the Iziko South African National Gallery), and the biodiversity of the Cape Flats Nature Reserve.

November 03, 2024 - October 05, 2025

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) presents One Must Be Seated, a solo exhibition by Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan. Deeply rooted within her Ghanaian culture, Benissan’s practice has particular focus on the reimagining of the royal umbrella and stool, symbols of Akan chieftaincy. The exhibition explores the enstoolment of a prospective chief, akin to coronation; a call to take their rightful seat in the stool that has been chosen for them. 

Through tapestry, sculpture, photography and video, Benissan’s work highlights and celebrates the rich traditions of Ghanaian culture, with a focus on Asante customs. The royal umbrella has been used since at least the 17th century, it transforms the individual underneath it, attributing significant status. Different sizes, colors, and unique gold totems that crown the umbrella canopy are seen as they move with the court in lively procession. Under the umbrella, the chief and his thoughts are hidden from the heavens above, prohibiting even God from accessing them.  

On View Through July 20, 2025

This exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance.  

Nguyen’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories. He opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures. 

The exhibition presents three film works: Because No One Living Will Listen / Nguoi Song Chang Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). All three films are connected by the period 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin. This affirms a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond. 

Nguyen creates sculptural objects that materialize his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicate embroidered tapestries of Viet Minh propaganda leaflets in A Breach (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019).