A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You is a three-part group exhibition curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung across Johannesburg and Cape Town, with a satellite presentation at Umhlabathi Collective. Bringing together 20 artists, it draws on Lapiro de Mbanga’s No Make Erreur and writing by Eloghosa Osunde to frame urgent questions of power, extraction, and resistance.

Moving across multiple sites, the project links histories of colonial and economic violence to contemporary forms of precarity, while foregrounding practices of survival, solidarity, and remembrance. It treats exhibition-making as a way of mapping entangled political and ecological conditions across geographies. The project positions art as both witness and counter-form, holding space for reflection, repair, and collective imagining within a fractured present shaped by ongoing systems of extraction and exclusion.

Curated by Bisi Silva, Meyina marks the artist's first solo museum exhibition in South Africa, presented by Iziko Museums of South Africa in partnership with the gallery and the Friends of the Iziko South African National Gallery. First shown at the Prince Claus Gallery in Amsterdam, the exhibition travels to the gallery in Johannesburg before its museum presentation at Iziko. Through scintillating sculptural installations, the exhibition traces Anatsui's engagement with African history, postcolonial identity, and the transformative possibilities of discarded material.

Silva, who passed away in 2019, wrote of the exhibition: ‘Over the past few decades he has been able to articulate his interest in and study of African history and its post-colonial identity. In this exhibition, I hope to highlight aspects of his artistic practice, as well as his professional career as a university professor and its impact on several generations of artists, curators and writers from Nigeria, West Africa and across the continent.’

Speaking the Unspeakable is Grada Kilomba’s first solo exhibition on the African continent and with the gallery. The presentation marks a significant moment for South African audiences to encounter her interdisciplinary practice, which engages questions of decoloniality, memory, trauma, and voice.

Curated by Lara Koseff with creative production by Moses Leo, the exhibition featured new work that draws on storytelling, performance, theatre, and choreography.

For her first solo exhibition in Africa, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga presents The Sun Never Sets, a body of work that positions the natural world as a witness to colonial rule. The centrepiece is a video montage of sunsets filmed across countries once under British subjection, evoking the imperial claim from which the exhibition takes its title. Nature here is not backdrop but archive, bearing quiet testimony to the human histories enacted upon it.

In her ongoing series Flowers for Africa, Kiwanga consults florists to recreate flower arrangements drawn from archival imagery of African independence ceremonies, placing them in the gallery where they gradually wilt and die. The arrangements speak to the thwarted hopes of post-independence Africa, fragile and inevitable in equal measure. Together the works offer a contemplative reckoning with colonialism, not as history concluded but as something that persists, subtly, in the landscapes and ceremonies of the present.

The gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Alfredo Jaar, coinciding with the installation of his large-scale work The Sound of Silence at the Wits Art Museum. Among the shows is Amílcar, Frantz, Patrice, and the Others (2016), a body of work that reflects Jaar's sustained inquiry into the skewed power dynamics governing global societies and the role of mass media in shaping them.

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Liza Essers, Africans in America, the second instance of the In Context series, examines artistic exchanges between Africa and the United States, presented across the gallery and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The exhibition features works by Ghada Amer, Theaster Gates, Alfredo Jaar, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Odili Donald Odita, and Kehinde Wiley.

The show coincides with Black Portraiture[s] III, the first time this international conference is hosted on the African continent, and brings together artists, scholars, and activists to consider representations of the Black body and broader diasporic histories. Together, the exhibition and conference form part of a citywide programme running from November 2016 to January 2017.

Curator and digital media artist Tegan Bristow brings her sustained research into technology-based art across Africa to the gallery, shaping an exhibition, Post African Futures, that challenges the blanket application of AfroFuturism to African artists engaging with technology. Drawing on practices from South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tunisia, and the DRC among others, the exhibition proposes that African cultures of technology are distinct, politically grounded, and resistant to both romanticised Africanisms and globalised media norms.

Artists include CUSS Group, Tabita Rezaire, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Emeka Ogboh, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, and Wanuri Kahiu, among others. The programme extends beyond the gallery through performances, screenings, talks, and a closing event at King Kong in Troyville.

The 2013 edition of [Working Title] brings together a cohort of artists testing the edges of contemporary South African practice. The exhibition traces independent, cross-disciplinary work spanning 3D cinema experiments, game-based pieces, short fiction, punk-leaning performances, and painters and photographers probing how images look back.

The programme extends beyond the gallery: Cuss Group stages an off-site Video Party, The Frown and The Brother Moves On perform after the opening, and Achille Mbembe delivers The Postcolony Revisited, presented in partnership with WISER.

Premiering under the Dance Umbrella at Goodman Gallery Projects, Uncles & Angels is a collaboration between Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke J van Veuren that takes the Reed Dance as its central motif. The work probes chastity, virginity testing, and the uneasy power dynamics embedded in this annual spectacle, part cultural rite, part tourist draw, part political theatre.

Xaba and van Veuren pick at the contradictions: a tradition revived during the AIDS crisis; young women celebrated yet routinely exposed, commodified, and sometimes endangered; ideals of purity set against a world where political elites behave with impunity.

Brett Murray’s The Spear became the focus of a widely reported national controversy after the African National Congress initiated legal proceedings regarding its depiction of President Jacob Zuma. The matter quickly developed into a broader public debate on artistic freedom and constitutional rights.

The dispute was ultimately resolved through a negotiated settlement, with the ANC withdrawing its court application and related legal action. The gallery acknowledged the public response and sensitivity surrounding the work, and the matter was brought to a close without a court ruling, marking a significant moment in ongoing discussions around freedom of expression in contemporary South African art.

Conceived by Liza Essers and launched during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, In Context brings together works by Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Kader Attia, William Kentridge, Kendell Geers, Jenny Holzer, Yinka Shonibare, Mikhael Subotzky, Hank Willis Thomas, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Kara Walker. As South Africa briefly becomes a home to the world, the exhibition meditated on place, belonging, and displacement, tracing the fragile architectures of home itself, drawing in voices from across geographies and experiences to complicate any single story of place.

Born in New Jersey to a photographer mother and a jazz musician father who was a member of the Black Panther Party, Hank Willis Thomas grew up at the intersection of image-making and political urgency. By 2008, his monograph Pitch Blackness had won the Aperture West Book Prize, and his Unbranded series, in which he digitally stripped all products and logos from decades of advertisements targeting African Americans, asking what exactly was always being sold, had established him as one of the most searching voices on race and visual culture in America. Among the first artists Liza Essers brings into the programme, his debut solo exhibition in South Africa, All Things Being Equal, opens at the gallery in 2010, a meeting between that American excavation and a country with its own unfinished reckoning with how blackness has been constructed and commodified. It marks the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

The exhibition brings together Amadlozi Group members Ezrom Legae, Sydney Kumalo, Cecil Skotnes, and Edoardo Villa, before travelling to New York where it is presented at Jack Gallery. The opening draws around 300 people, marking the first time this group of South African artists is shown together in the city.

Spanning six decades of work from 1902 to 1967, the exhibition brings together previously unseen works by Pablo Picasso drawn from the personal collection of Marina Picasso, marking the first time Picasso's work is shown in South Africa. Organised in association with James Kirkman Ltd and Galerie Jan Krugier, the show opens at the gallery in Hyde Park before travelling to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.

In the year following the killing of Steve Biko, Ezrom Legae produces a series of drawings that hint at violence without naming it. When officials threaten confiscation, Linda Givon intervenes, insisting the works are mere portrayals of poultry. The drawings later travel to the controversial Valparaíso Biennial in Chile

Goodman Gallery holds a memorial retrospective of Cyprian Shilakoe's etchings and wood totems, works shaped by African legend, reincarnation, and social memory. Shilakoe saw himself as a chronicler for his people; the totems he was completing at the time of his death were transcriptions of his etchings onto wood. He had shown extensively across Europe and America, and shortly before his death took first prize in a competition at the University of California. He was 25 when he died in a motor accident in September 1972.

After exhibiting in London and at the Vernon Gallery in Preston alongside Winston Saoli and Cyprian Shilakoe, Matsoso makes his Johannesburg debut. His drawings treat the human figure as a structural form: elongated, twisting lines that recall branches and architectural frameworks. The work is technically assured and quietly experimental, moving beyond traditional figuration.

Edoardo Villa presents a major exhibition of steel and bronze sculpture. Moving away from circular and amorphous forms, the steel works adopts a more linear, defined language, balancing abstraction with a sustained sense of volume. Works such as Arising Form signal a recalibration rather than a break, registering Villa’s attempt to refine sculptural clarity without relinquishing the density and force of his earlier work.

Seventeen artists work directly onto the pavement outside the gallery in Hyde Park, producing granolithic images made to disappear. Among them, Leonard Matsoso, then 24, takes first prize: a trip to Paris. Crowds gather as the works slowly erode back into the street, turning artistic labour into public spectacle.

Founded by Linda Givon, Goodman opens in Hyde Park, Johannesburg, establishing itself as a gallery dedicated to the art of its own moment. Its dramatic black-walled interior hosts an ambitious inaugural display combining major international modernists including Chagall, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Magritte, Matisse, Miró, Giacometti, Schiele, and Moore with work by around thirty artists.

‘In 1966, when Linda (then Goodman) had returned to this country and first invited viewers into the ‘black cube’ of her new gallery, it was a time when South Africa and its artists were not even a tiny blip on the radar of the international art world. She started to bring to South Africa the work of contemporary international artists like Victor Vasarely, Mimo Palladino, and Henry Moore. Even more importantly, she sought out and launched the careers of local artists whose work she felt had something to say, whose work had energy, was confrontational, and moved beyond the safe and lacklustre, ‘always taking into account the social demographics of this country’, as she said.’

–Sue Williamson, in ‘Remembering Linda Givon’ 2020.