Two exhibitions showing at Candice Berman Gallery turn their attention to questions that are at once deeply personal and distinctly South African. In Pursuit of a Glimmer is a portrayal by a group of women artists beyond the familiar celebrations of Women’s Month to consider what progress, autonomy and meaningful change actually resemble. Elsewhere in the gallery, Frans Thoka begins with something much more intimate: a family photo album and the uncomfortable realisation that some of the people pictured in it had become strangers.
Different in approach and scale, both exhibitions ask us to look a little more closely at what we inherit, what we remember and what we might choose to change.
Happy Women’s Day: In Pursuit of a Glimmer
Last year’s iteration of Happy Women’s Day sat with the contradictions of Women’s Month: the celebration, the tension and the persistent gap between the occasion and many women’s lived realities. This year’s exhibition, In Pursuit of a Glimmer, pushes the conversation further, looking beyond celebration to ask what meaningful change might actually require.
Curated by Dudubloom More, the exhibition brings together Jessica R Adams, Yolanda Mazwana, More and Rina Noto, whose practices engage with the social, cultural and institutional forces that continue to shape women’s lives.
Across the works, questions of inherited norms, silence, care, resilience and memory repeatedly surface. At the centre of many of them is autonomy and the different ways women claim agency within, against and sometimes despite the circumstances they inhabit.
It is an exhibition that takes Women’s Month seriously enough to question it. Not because celebration has no value, but because acknowledgement without change can only go so far.
In Pursuit of a Glimmer runs at Candice Berman Gallery until September 28 2026.
Moletelo: A Gathering of Memories
Frans Thoka’s solo exhibition began with a borrowed family photo album. His maternal grandmother lent it to him and, as he turned its pages, Thoka encountered faces he had not seen in years, some of whom he could no longer name. An uncomfortable question followed: would he ever see these people again, or would the next gathering be a funeral? He decided not to wait to find out.
In Sepedi, moletelo refers to a night vigil, a gathering in which family and community remain together through the darkness, holding space for the living and those who came before. That idea of gathering becomes the thread running through the exhibition.
Working across sculpture, installation, textiles, drawing and oil painting, Thoka takes the deeply personal material of the family album and opens it up to something more universal. Here, memory isn’t treated simply as something to preserve. It needs to be revisited and shared, kept alive through the people who carry it.
The photographs connect those pictured in the album with the people encountering Thoka’s work today, allowing the exhibition to become a broader reflection on family, inheritance and how easily connections can loosen when we stop tending to them.
There is something quietly affecting about that idea. Moletelo is the kind of exhibition that might have you leaving the gallery thinking about your own family album, the faces you haven’t seen in a while and, perhaps, who you should call before another occasion brings everyone together.
Moletelo: A Gathering of Memories runs at Candice Berman Gallery until August 28 2026.
Wanted
