VelaProjects is pleased to present: The Joburg Group Show.

Emerging from a simple desire to engage with and celebrate Johannesburg as it’s sister city, the exhibition features work by Joburg-based artists Khanya Zibaya, Lady Skollie, Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Michael MacGarry, Nyakallo Maleke, Nthabiseng Kekana, Kay-Leigh Fisher, Chuma Adam and Dumile Feni.

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Together these artists guide us through a short, sharp, and incomplete tour around the city – touching on the specific mix of cultures, voices, energy and history that make up a city built through rapid industrialisation, extraction, transformation, resistance, political organizing, cultural innovation and defining many of the most important occasions in South Africa’s history.

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Nowadays,the city exists as the economic and cultural hub of the country – complex in almost every facet. It is simultaneously wealthy and unequal, ambitious and fragile, cosmopolitan and deeply divided. It is the country's financial center, home to major corporations, creative industries, universities, and migrants from across Africa. At the same time, it faces challenges of  infrastructure decline, spatial inequality, unemployment, and uneven service delivery. As a result, Johannesburg often feels unfinished—constantly demolishing, rebuilding, migrating, adapting, and reinventing itself.

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Khanya Zibaya's practice is deeply connected to Johannesburg's atmosphere of instability and endurance. In his debut solo exhibition, We Should All Be Dead, he explores infrastructural collapse, economic precarity, racial histories, and collective survival, drawing attention to the overlooked aspects of urban life and the inequalities embedded within the city. His practice is deeply rooted in the act of revealing what is frequently overlooked, drawing from a personal intimacy with the discarded to produce multidisciplinary works. His process compels the viewer to engage with the marginalized and the unseen, challenging the boundaries of urban visibility.

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With similar interests, Michael MacGarry examines colonial histories, mining legacies, and systems of power. His work interrogates how historical narratives are constructed and how colonial and apartheid ideologies continue to shape public space and collective memory.

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MacGarry’s Mighty Man (Issue 17), is an acrylic screen print of a scene from the original comic, onto a canvas made from reclaimed packaging paper. The work not only comments on the cultural strategies employed by the state to legitimise segregation and influence everyday life under apartheid, but it also emphasises the equal need by South Africans to both remember and reclaim.

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Although originally from Cape Town, Lady Skollie's rise is closely linked toJohannesburg's contemporary art ecosystem. Through humour, autobiography, and references to South African popular culture, she challenges patriarchal and colonial representations of women's bodies, becoming a leading voice on female sexuality, pleasure, and agency in South African art. She has been noticed significantly for influencing the South African art scene, having even been asked to design the R5 coin to commemorate 25 years of democracy. The elevation of the mediums she uses in her work conveys a boldness and brightness which brings to mind the “general vibe” often associated with Joburg.  

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Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee’s practice is rooted in materials and the history they carry. Her practice functions as a site for negotiating the complexities of a diasporic identity, moving between decolonial methodologies and Eastern philosophies. By employing traditional folk techniques, she seeks to soothe the friction of displacement within the context of a post-apartheid landscape.

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Nyakallo Maleke’s work explores the convergence and conversation of diverse materials, investigating how they forge unexpected links or offer mutual resistance. Often utilizing humble and unconventional media that mirror her physical navigation of the urban landscape—such as thread, wax paper, crayon, pastel, and lightweight plastic—her practice reflects the tactile complexities of the city. In fact, Seeding alludes to maps through its dotted threads and circular movements, drawing connections between the overlapping realities that coexist across different parts of the city. The work suggests a way of tracing one’s location, both physically and ethereally, mapping not only place but also memory and presence.

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Nthabiseng Kekana’s work proposes alternative ways of understanding place and selfhood that sit outside dominant modern and secular frameworks. Her practice interrogates the construction of identity and the concept of home within the urban landscape, anchored by the provocative sentiment that "no one is from Joburg." Titled Who am I?, the work is inextricably linked to her calling as a traditional healer, weaving together ancestral knowledge with themes of creation and belonging. This exploration carries profound weight in a city defined by migration, occupying a complex threshold between a true home and a transitory site of labor and extraction.

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Kay-Leigh Fisher’s practice is deeply informed by a preoccupation with the past, specifically the sentiment that Johannesburg is a city perpetually anchored inits own history. This retrospective gaze often manifests as a longing for a bygone era—a time when neighborhoods like Hillbrow were considered pristine, and the city’s economic and social structures felt more secure. In these two works, Meeting Places II and You Should Be here, she draws from her personal family archives, repositioning these peripheral narratives into the urban center.

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At its core, Chuma Adam’s practice centers on the act of mark-making—not merely asa physical gesture upon the canvas, but as an exploration of the enduring traces left behind. This is anchored in her theoretical framework of “Situatedness,” a concept that suggests meaning and knowledge are inextricably bound to their specific geographical and social environments.

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Her interest lies not in the singular, isolated gesture, but in the friction and resonance created when repeated marks collide. Through this lens, the city of Johannesburg is reimagined through its vast chronological depth, reaching back far beyond its industrial founding to the ancient geological and human histories of the Cradle of Humankind.

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Chuma distills these complex histories into their most essential visual forms, offering a perspective on deep time that reflects both ancient and contemporary marks. Rather than depicting Johannesburg directly, these artists approach the city as a psychological, social, and political condition—one experienced through the body, memory, movement, spirituality, and desire.

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Collectively, their practices offer a nuanced portrait of contemporary South African life and its ongoing negotiations with history, identity, and belonging.

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