presented by Sinki Makubu

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“Take a walk with me” An invitation to accompany another through the paths they navigate. This exhibition extends that call, walking alongside narratives shaped by South Africa’s enduring traumas and the identities forged within them. It retraces the long walk once framed as a journey to freedom. A walk that promised unity and equality but left uneven footprints on a divided land.

Thabo Mbeki’s 1996 I Am an African speech captured the dream of shared belonging: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Yet decades later, inequality persists. The promise of freedom has become a daily balancing act—between aspiration and limitation, belonging and exclusion. The imagined “rainbow nation” remains fractured, its hues dimmed by enduring disparities that live on in economy, education, and everyday life.

Wonder in Sonder walks through this tension, asking: what does it mean to move through a country still stitched together by old seams of separation? Across three interwoven spectrums; homestand, self-actualisation, and spiritual fulfilment. The exhibition explores how South Africans rebuild, redefine, and reclaim meaning within inherited boundaries.
Homestand reflects on resourcefulness, how communities make do with what lies within reach, creating worlds from limited means. It considers the pride, labour, and memory embedded in the everyday, and how people craft belonging even within constraint.
Self-actualisation turns inward, tracing how identity unfolds within and against communal expectation. It reflects on what it means to walk tall in spaces that question one’s right to be. How survival becomes a choreography of negotiation between vulnerability and strength, self and society.

Spiritual fulfilment anchors the final leg of this walk. In Africa, spirituality moves beside daily life, sometimes as guide, sometimes as warning. It shapes how people navigate the visible and the unseen, grounding faith, doubt, and renewal within the same step.
Wonder in Sonder reframes walking as both method and metaphor: a way of seeing, feeling, and being-with. To walk is to listen, to accompany, to remember. It suggests that freedom is not a destination reached, but a movement continuously practised. A rhythm carried in the body and shared across generations.

In a country where walking has always been political, whether to march, to migrate, to seek work, or to return home. Every step carries history.

This exhibition invites viewers to slow their pace, to notice. Wonder in Sonder is a walk through that shared terrain: uneven, tender, and unending.

Wonder In Sonder : A way of seeing, feeling,  and being-with.

To enquire about any of the artworks in this exhibition