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From iconic public artworks (discover a few of our favourites), interesting street art, and 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.
Art highlights
Opening Wed, Nov 13 at 18:00 – Everard Read's end-of-year group show, Inner Sanctum, is a glimpse into the studios and creative processes of 50 contemporary South African artists. The world of the artist is a strange one: from the ordered to the chaotic and the spontaneous to the rigorously planned, each has their own way of creating. Central to the process is the space in which the creativity occurs. For this exhibition, the gallery's head curator Gina Molle invited artists to share their interpretations of their workspaces, saying, "We hoped they'd interpret the brief in whatever way they saw fit – whether it was capturing a moment in a sunlit corner, creating an homage to the endless coffees drunk in a day, or a sculpture that speaks to the frustration of making."
Opening Fri, Nov 15 – 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.
Opening Tue, Nov 19 at 18:00 – We loved seeing Esther Mahlangu's major retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. Good news for Joburg: the solo travels to Wits Art Museum (WAM) for an extended run. Thanks to her marvellous skill and ability to carry her heritage and culture forward, Mahlangu is an icon in the local art world. She has been painting since the age of 10, learning from her mother, grandmother, and women in her hometown of Mthambothini village in Mpumalanga. Colourful and geometric, her work honours the symbolic and visual language of traditional Ndebele art. Mahlangu celebrated her 89th birthday on Nov 11, 2024. Her retrospective exhibition is a survey of her wide-ranging and in-depth work over the years.
Opening Thu, Nov 21 – A curatorial project by the House of African Feminisms, Abafa(ba)zi – Those Who Die Knowing at Goethe-Institut unpacks the role of black women as custodians of stories and preservers of knowledge. The collaborative group showcase includes commissioned works and artistic experiments, as well as existing works by transdisciplinary artists and researchers from Africa. "This exhibition highlights the ways in which women have served as conduits of knowledge in ordinary settings and communities; it also positions us (black women) as preservers of our own narratives," reads the curatorial statement. The agency of African women and the qualities of femininity, imagination, and innovation present in African societies are celebrated in Abafa(ba)zi.
Until Thu, Nov 21 – Works on Paper at 44 Stanley's the gallery is all about the dynamic, wonderfully personal relationship between the artist, the medium, and the surface. Stephen Allwright, Deborah Bell, Janet Mbirimi, and more join in this exploration. "Each artist has a unique connection with their chosen surface, particularly with paper – one of the most unassuming and universal foundations for creating," reads the curatorial statement. From tissues to disposable containers, bags, and newspapers, we encounter paper in various forms every day. When it's used for the purposes of art, however, paper becomes more than an ephemeral, throwaway object. "It's a repository for ideas, a place for transitions, and even a symbol of absence."
Until Fri, Nov 29 – Decades of Connection at Alliance Française chronicles the evolution of Air France's route between France and South Africa, first embarked upon in 1953. It's an ode to the glory days of travel and French elegance, with vintage photographs, advertisements, cabin crew uniforms, and other memorabilia. Through archived press articles, South African tourism statistics, and historical documents, this exhibition commemorates the cultural impact that this route has had on both countries.
Until Fri, Dec 6 – Zimbabwe-born artist Raymond Fuyana trained as a printmaker at the Artist Proof Studio, but he's a self-taught painter. The visual realm is especially charged for Fuyana, who is hearing impaired. In his surreal, mind-bending works, the artist employs his own personal colour coding, while motifs around fantasy, technology, and the environment are regular fixtures. Beyond the Board is his first solo exhibition with Guns & Rain. Attend an artist-led walkabout with Fuyana on Sat, Nov 23.
Until Sat, Dec 7 – Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's (JCAF) annual exhibition explores the natural world and our place in it. From Ernesto Neto's deep sea-inspired installation to Ximena Garrido-Lecca's growing garden in the gallery, Ecospheres is a trip through the Global South that brings diverse cultures and ideas together. It's a useful accompaniment to thinking through our place in the world, particularly regarding stewardship and living together for the mutual benefit of all. What is refreshing is that no hard and fast answers are offered up – leaving ample space to explore. Read our reflections on Ecospheres here. We loved our guided tour of this thoughtful curatorial project and can't recommend a viewing enough. By appointment only; make your booking here.
Until Fri, Dec 13 – Prolific Pretoria-born, Cape Town-based artist Zander Blom shares a new body of work in a solo at Stevenson gallery. With a dramatic painting dripping in front of the artist's busy studio space, seeing the title shot for Blom's exhibition, Monochrome Paintings, makes you wish you could view the works in situ. Though that's kind of the magic of Blom's work anyhow – his style is so distinct, and his works so process-driven that you can't help but get swept up in his world. It's heavy black meets stark white and chaos meets order in these abstract, evocative paintings.
Until Jan 26, 2025 – Human connection, play, poetry, and curiosity are central to Odette Graskie's philosophy, as well as her creative process. We see this in Side Quest, a new body of work from the artist exhibited at Berman Contemporary, one of the galleries at 223 Jan Smuts Creative Hub. The exhibition is an ode to uncertainty, with Graskie saying, "Within the making process, all the work felt like me trying to answer a different question every time, each work leading to more and more questions. The tunnels, the embroidery, the hanging paper works are diaphanous, each one more see-through than the previous. [...] These pieces, while separate, thread together in this space and become site-specific attempts at embracing the light and the location."
Until Mar, 2025 – Off the back of his 2023 FNB Art Prize win, photographic artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa's solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper comes to Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). In this exhibition, two significant and interconnected bodies of work – namely I carry Her photo with Me and Ezilalini (The Country) – unite under the banner of introspection and discovery as Sobekwa navigates profound personal loss and grapples with his sense of belonging. "Photography is a powerful tool," says the artist. "It has enabled me to share the realities of smaller, more intimate narratives that project onto the larger map that is South African history." The storytelling potential of photography is central to the work of Sobekwa, who documents experiences as a form of excavation. He stitches together fragments of memory in a quest to unravel the mysteries of the past, and to find comfort and closure. Read our interview with Sobekwa here.
Until Mar 2025 – What does it mean to be "born free" in South Africa? Dutch photographer Ilvy Njiokiktjien's solo exhibition Born Free: Generation of Hope at the Apartheid Museum is a visual narrative of the past three decades in South Africa, since the dawn of our democracy in 1994. Through Njiokiktjien's lens, we encounter an intimate portrayal of the first generation to grow up after apartheid rule. It's a poignant body of work that delves into the promise of a "rainbow nation", dealing equally with hope and disillusionment.
Until Apr 2025 – What do you get following an intense artistic engagement with a scientific subject – the 2.5–2.8-million-year-old Taung skull, which was discovered in 1924? Joni Brenner's solo exhibition at Origins Centre, Impact, encapsulates her long-term creative reckoning with the child's skull, broadly exploring themes of "fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure, and chance". Unusual, beautiful, and thought-provoking are a few more words that come to mind when describing Brenner's response to this ancient piece of the story of human evolution.
Closing soon
Until Fri, Nov 15 – Phumulani Ntuli's solo exhibition Umfanekiso Uyopha Inkungu (An Image Oozes Mist) is an exceptional exploration of the merging of traditional printmaking methods with digital techniques at UJ Art Gallery. Featuring large-scale, mixed-media collages on canvas and a stop-motion animation video, Ntuli's work presents reconfigured and fragmented archival images of significant historical figures in South Africa. With his art, he questions the nature of archives and explores the politics of image-making. His ultimate aim is to decontextualise images so that the story they tell is interrupted, and the viewer is invited to reconsider the narrative at hand.
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