Kapisha Ramraj is currently a Honours level student in the Visual Culture Department of Pretoria University. She is also currently enrolled in an online course at the Berlin-based Node Centre for Curatorial Studies on Arts Publishing as a Curatorial Practice.

Kapisha Ramraj

IT HAS WEIGHT. It has humour. It blurs the boundaries between the individual and collective, bringing to the fore countless opportunities for shared meaning-making. This is what you can anticipate from One and the Many, an exhibition curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, until the end of April 2026.

Spanning two museum floors, seven themes and 121 artworks, the exhibition is a visual feast which draws on three significant art collections in South Africa: The Bongi Dhlomo Collection, South32 and the collection in the Javett-UP’s care formerly owned by the Javett Family. Here, six invited contemporary voices cleave with seminal ones, making you feel like your voice, too, belongs. Artworks by Stephané E. Conradie, Goldendean, Ledelle Moe, Abdus Salaam, Inga Somdyala and Katlego Tlabela prove to be expansive conceptual responses to the themes in three exhibition themes.

The exhibition is structured to invite you in with the vibrancy of colour. The blood red sails of Inga Somdyala’s site-specific 2025 commission lift your gaze towards the three-story high atrium, before the heavenly teal of the theme of The Altar draws you towards the exhibition’s first theme. The warmth of the wooden, bronze and terracotta sculptures in The Altar contrasts with their cool platform. Behind this, the navy and red walls of the theme Fractured Formsviciously sing to each other, reflecting the tensions of apartheid violence with which the second theme grapples. This colourful dynamism sets up an unspoken conversation throughout the exhibition.

Different wall colours excite the senses, harmonising with the artworks that hang on them. Not only do they separate the themes, making them easily distinguishable — leafy green for the theme called The Garden, navy blue for the theme of Tswelopele (a Setswana word meaning Progress), pink for the theme of Embrace and so on — but each colour also invigorates our perception of its exhibit. Most notably, the shade of pink that frames Embrace marries with the yellows, golds and blacks in the theme’s artworks, bringing them to life. In this subtle way, the simplicity of curated colour transforms the space, helping you understand it better and experience it more fully and more viscerally. 

This is not the only curatorial decision that makes One and the Many viewer-friendly. The exhibition plays with spatial relations, allowing you to engage intimately and tangibly with its themes. In The Altar, the theme’s description text is placed on the ground rather than the wall, causing the viewer to literally ‘bow down’ to the exhibit to read it. Prompting the mind to question what we view as an icon (as The Altar seeks to do) is one thing — bringing the theme into our bodies is another.

The Garden does this, too. The theme explores the idea of the garden, described in the exhibition’s press material as “between the inside and outside,” a “buffer zone” and a site of separation. Exhibited in an easily forgotten space between floors, its placement reflects its thematic liminality, echoing ideas of separation and the in-between. The window, looking out onto the centre’s garden, further blurs the lines between inside and outside, transforming exploratory questions into a lived experience.

And the theme Colossal Time, in the View Gallery, contemplates scale with Ledelle Moe’s monumental cement works that dwarf the body, alongside Jeremy Wafer’s 1998 photographic series of antholes. The exhibit uses natural elements to put your existence into perspective, aided by the floor-to-ceiling window that opens the gallery to the vastness of the natural world beyond it. Here, the experience of space speaks with the artworks.   

But why do we need a space of belonging? Why should we forsake the elite, white-walled museum for a colourful space of play and interaction? The answer is clear: Museums are known for being institutions of rigid rules, valuable objects and estrangement. When you set foot inside one, you are seized by its rules so that in this hallowed place, you may meander respectfully through its halls, nodding from a distance in sober appreciation. With this ritual comes a feeling that we don’t really belong there. We mustn’t touch. We must be quiet. We must look from afar, our hands behind our backs. We are passing eyes and minds that affirm the unquestioned genius of elusive art objects. And it follows: when art is rendered untouchable, so are the biases that accompany it. A singular meaning is formed, accepted as knowledge. The portrait of the colonialist is accepted as a testament to economic achievement, ignoring its underlying violence.

In being curated for welcome, One and the Many cracks meaning open and invites the world in. Through seducing you into engaging with it, the exhibition places you in dialogue with its artworks. Even through the text on the walls, this exhibition constantly asks the viewer, “What do you think?” There is an ever-present spirit of collaboration between curator and visitor, inside and outside, space and body, prompting new relationships of meaning to form. As performance artist Andrea Fraser said in 2005, “We are the institution”. The separation between the art expert and the common man, or museum and public, is an illusion — art never exists alone. When you walk into a museum, you bring with your heritage, history and humanity, inherently (and hopefully only metaphorically) tracking mud onto its floor. Your beliefs converse with the artworks you look at, striking up subconscious collaboration, like the unique meaning created by the to and fro of a ping-pong ball at play.

Collaboration, here, is another unspoken theme that sits at the heart of One and the Many, perhaps best embodied in the conversation circle in front of The Altar. Throughout the exhibition’s run, the soft carpets and stools hosted many conversation-centred events. Practising a Living School methodology, participants explored South African art history, mentorship and intergenerational dialogue in conversation with living artists, including Johannes Phokela, Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa and Pat Mautloa, whose works draw deeply from South African politics and history. In hosting guests and demystifying artistic intent, One and the Many brought the outside inside, prompting conversation. It invited new narratives to form, placing the creation of knowledge in the hands of the viewer. The artist speaks; the audience speaks back.

The final and arguably most fruitful conversation in One and the Many, lies in its dialogue between South Africa’s past and present. The exhibition draws from three collections of distinction, boasting the art of giants in South African art history. Gerard Sekoto’s Song of the Pick (1946), in quiet, rhythmic grandeur, hangs on the navy walls of Tswelopele, courtesy of the South32 Collection. The humility of Irma Stern’s brushwork in Backyard (undated but understood to have been made in the 1920s) can be admired in the same exhibit, courtesy of the Javett Family Collection. And in The Altar hangs George Pemba’s Black Jesus (1985), courtesy of the Bongi Dhlomo Collection. These collections showcase artworks by artists who captured the zeitgeist of apartheid South Africa, filling out its narrative with diversity and honesty.

It’s against this backdrop that Janse van Rensburg’s six invited contemporary artists exhibit their work, each using different media. Conradie’s mixed media sculptures carry legacies of creolisation and colonialism, Goldendean’s 2021 inflatable work Soft Vxnxs invites queer celebration, and Tlabela’s series of collages imagine a future of luxury, testifying to Black excellence. Salaam’s video work, Rivulets (2024), invites you to slow down, while Moe’s 2025 Undulation I and Undulation II cement works remind you that you aren’t as big as you may think you are. South Africa’s past meets South Africa’s present, unified by the thread of time. The exhibition’s constant riffing on unexpected relationships opens new artworks to old meanings and breathes fresh life into both.

Conversation sparks everywhere in One and the Many, from its walls to its artworks. But creating conversation between past and present is what proposes the museum as a space of progress. In a post-apartheid South Africa, apartheid is never truly absent. Like the violence that lingers on the psyche in Fractured Forms, the ghosts of South Africa’s past linger in its present, under the illusion of temporal separation. In curating a space of welcome, cultivating diverse collaboration and opening possibilities for new relationships, One and the Many positions the Javett-UP as an incubator of empathy — a container that volunteers itself to host the necessary conversations. Rather than prescribing ideas, the curatorial strategies of One and the Many transforms a place of looking into a place of learning, enabling us to imagine a future built by the hands of not one, but many. If you catch the right angle, at the right time of day, Somdyala’s red sail reflects on the face of Santu Mofokeng’s late brother, the peaceful subject of the artist’s photograph. His face turns towards the sail’s upward ascent, separated by time and space, yet unified in that moment. As if by cosmic coincidence, the exhibition reminds us that relationship is inevitable… and divinely made.

• One and the Many is curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg at the Javett-UP Art Centre in Pretoria, and will be on show until the end of April 2026.
• Exhibiting artists: Bill Ainslie, Jane Alexander, Siemon Allen, Bridget Baker, Walter Battis, Deborah Bell, Kim Berman, Willie Bester, Gerard Bhengu, Jean Brundrit, Norman Catherine, Peter Clarke, Steven Cohen, Marlene Dumas, Dumile Feni, Gordon Gabashane, Simryn Gill, Neil Goedhals, Jackson Hlungwani, Wopko Jensma, Thamae Kaashe, William Kentridge, David Koloane, Percy Konqobe, Sydney Kumalo, Moshekwa Langa, Ezrom Legae, Aileen Lipkin, Noria Mabasa, Fikile Magadlela, Louis Khehla Maqhubela, Johannes Maswanganyi, Avhashoni Mainganye, Patrick Mautloa, Qwaa Mangana, Nelson Mukhuba, Speelman Mahlangu, Mapula Embroidery, Leonard Matsoso, Ernest Mancoba, Eric Mbatha, Azaria Mbatha, Santu Mofokeng, Nathaniel Mokgosi, Julian Motau, John Muafangejo, Ephraim Ngatane, Muziwakhe Jacob Nhlabatsi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Tony Nkotsi, Bonnie Ntshalintshali, Derrick Nxumalo, Walter Oltmann, Fred Page, George Pemba, Johannes Phokela, David Phoshoko, Adrian Piper, Meshack Raphalalani, Tracey Rose, Harold Rubin, Claudette Schreuders, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Gerard Sekoto, Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe, Lucky Sibiya, Dr Phuthuma Seoka, Johannes Segogela, Mavis Shabalala, Durant Sihlali, Lucas Thandokwazi Sithole, Kathryn Smith, Paul Stopforth, Ncg’abe Taase, Alfred Thoba, William Timlin, and Michael Gagashe Zondi
• Kapisha Ramraj is currently an Honours level student in Visual Culture at the University of Pretoria and an online student at the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies in Berlin.