To see in Joburg – weekly exhibitions guide

Discover our picks of Joburg's must-see exhibitions and art events for the week of Thu, Feb 27 – Thu Mar 6, 2025, plus a few dates worth diarising.

From iconic public artworks ( discover a few of our favourites ), interesting street art, established galleries and museums to trailblazing indie spaces, and the  hardworking artists' studios in the City Centre , Johannesburg is a city for art lovers. We update this guide weekly to help you navigate the ever-changing array on offer, with a curated selection of solo and group shows, artist-led walkabouts, workshops, guided tours, and other art-related events worth your while. 

For a full guide to what’s on in Joburg, explore our events calendar. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter published every Thursday morning. For extra daily updates, follow our  Instagram page .

Exhibition openings and walkabouts (Thu, Feb 27 – Thu, Mar 6)

Opening Thu, Mar 6  –  Khanya Mthethwa celebrates South Africa's cultural history in a solo exhibition at the University of Johannesburg's (UJ) FADA Gallery , Abantu: Threads That Bind Us . In this showcase, Mthethwa bridges the past and present – exploring heritage and identity across two levels. The ground floor contains archival materials such as beaded artifacts and embroidered pictures of cultural leaders, while the upper level is for contemporary works, featuring present-day art jewellery to re-staged traditional portraits. "This [exhibition] will offer a reverent encounter with the legacies that have shaped South Africa’s indigenous identity," says  Mthethwa. 
Opening Thu, Mar 6  – Over 40 artists explore the skateboard deck as their canvas in the group exhibition,  Motion and Expression: The Space In Between , at  Origin Art . The gallery worked with  Crispy Skateboards  to bring this unusual show to fruition; a Joburg-based father and sons company known for bespoke decks and cool artists collabs. "Skateboarding is a language of motion – an act of balance, defiance, and improvisation. It is a culture built on self-expression, where style is everything, and creativity flourishes in the most unexpected spaces," reads the exhibition statement. Motion and Expression  features wide-ranging artistic voices, styles, and mediums, from graffiti to mixed media, fine art, and graphic design.

Closing soon

Until Fri, Feb 28  –  Migration Through Borderless Light is the title of Wayne Barker 's solo at Everard Read . These new works were "made in his garden at the edge of nowhere". It's all very evocative. Writes Sean O'Toole : "Barker is a bit Claude Monet, whose late paintings – liquid abstractions that dissolve visible experience into sensory colour – Barker has seen in person and greatly admires. Much like this vaunted ancestor, Barker’s paintings do not simply replicate the beauty of his surroundings but translates it, channelling its energy into bold, feverish compositions. Painting is an occult practice, an alchemical transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. For anyone doubting this, just look at Wayne Barker’s new paintings." 
Until Fri, Feb 28  – It's all about the power of dress and remembrance with the installation series  Fashion Accounts  at Museum Africa . This thought-provoking showcase is a response to the relative absence of black South African fashion histories within museum collections. The rituals of collecting, archiving, memorialising, and resisting through fashion are explored, contrasting Museum Africa's rich ethnographic collection of items and images capturing the country's people, places, and history with clothing from the Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection of mostly European and white-owned items from the mid-1700s to the early 2000s. Contemporary artists and collectives working within the realm of fashion,  Thebe Magugu ,  Sindiso Khumalo ,  The Sartists , and  Ncumisa 'Mimi' Duma , also have work in this exhibition.

Until Fri, Feb 28 – Visit Strauss & Co's Houghton showroom for a rare exhibition of wares from Kalahari Studio drawn from a private collection. Founded by Aleksanders Klopcanovs and Elma Vestman, the studio's sculptures, vases, and wall plaques feature figurative motifs from San rock art, local fauna and flora, and geometric patterns inspired by Zulu beadwork.

More art highlights 

Until Sun, Mar 2  – Sophia van Wyk's  mixed-media solo exhibition Love Default at the NIROX Covered Space (one of the galleries in the sprawling NIROX Sculpture Park ) explores the complex behaviours we perform in intimate relationships, charting the spectrum all the way from affection to dysfunction. Homer’s Odyssey , existentialist philosophy, and pop psychology all find their way into Van Wyk's art practice. We spot a bit of Nieu-Bethesda outsider artist  Helen Martins and her   Owl House in there, too. "My attempt to find form is also an attempt to find meaning," says Van Wyk.