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Walking into the opening of the newest gallery in Joburg this week, I was reminded that this city has always preferred its culture slightly offbeat. We live in a place where the poshest, glossiest residents comfortably socialise with the scruffiest, most inventive street-style provocateurs — often at the same bar and usually not by arrangement. The arrival of kumalo | turpin at Nine Yards, Parktown North’s freshly minted lifestyle enclave on Jan Smuts Avenue, feels like a well-timed entrance into a conversation between the many different Joburg types that was already underway.
The building itself sets the tone: a clever, modern mashup. A heritage house with its beautiful, old wooden floors and high, airy ceilings has been spliced into a sharper, more angular structure of concrete and glass.
At the centre are Zanele Kumalo and Murray Turpin, a partnership forged in the engine room of Kalashnikovv Gallery — that Braamfontein institution which, for over a decade, gave the city’s creative underground its colour and brushstroke. Their new venture isn’t, as Turpin points out, a rebrand. It’s something more strategic: a recalibration of power, geography and the rather loaded question of who gets to speak — and be heard — in the white cube.
Their inaugural exhibition, Genre/Gender, gathers a formidable roster — Boemo Diale, Láura Viruly, Thulile Gamedze, Yolanda Mazwana, among others — and toys with semantics in both an intellectual and instinctive way. Genre and gender: twin systems designed to organise, rank and sometimes exclude.
Diale, one of the youngest voices in the room, shows work that’s deceptively playful at first glance. Born in Joburg in 2000 and shaped by a post-apartheid upbringing across Rustenburg, Mafikeng and the city’s suburbs, her practice is steeped in questions of identity, inheritance and the aftershocks of generational trauma. Her canvases drift into a dreamlike register: voluptuous, obsidian figures pressed against the edges of iridescent environments she creates. There’s a push and pull at play — bodies resisting containment, then yielding to it — while tropical silhouettes and graffiti-bright palettes mask something more insistent. Diale mines her maternal lineage, folding fragments of family archive into these interior worlds. They are whimsical works, edged with an unresolved question about place and agency.
If Diale’s work expands outward, Ronél de Jager pulls inward with obsessive control. Her oil paintings, which take weeks to complete, are built through painstaking layers of delicate brushwork. Starting with floral arrangements, she digitally deconstructs and reconstructs them on canvas, invoking the technical precision of the Dutch Golden Age. Chiaroscuro is used to interrogate ideas of decay, of environmental precarity. Her flowers aren’t beautiful; they’re collapsing, standing in as metaphors for social and personal fragilities.
The intellectual background of the show, according to the curators, leans on bell hooks, whose notion of education as a “practice of freedom” informs the selection. The works — spanning painting, sculpture and photography — offer ways of seeing rather than conclusions that hit you over the head.
Read the wall text and the collective message becomes clear: a refusal to package “women’s art” into something easily consumable. These artists construct their own visual dialects — queer, diasporic, embodied — resisting expectations that identity must fit into a curated box.
Beyond the gallery, kumalo | turpin’s public art programme spills into the wider Nine Yards precinct, blurring the boundary between audience and participant. Kumalo speaks of engagement; Turpin of shifting hierarchies toward what they call the “global majority”.
Joburg’s art scene, recently described (like most of the city) as being in a lull, is staging a reinvention — one of many that have come before. Our latest addition to the scene, kumalo | turpin, offers something different to the city’s art map — and its purveyors seem to be less interested in centre versus margin than in dissolving the distinction completely.
This article was first published in TimesLive.
