Structures
- Metja Hlogi Matlala
- Dec 24, 2025
- 5 min read
The Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) presented “Structures”, an exhibition so expansive in its inquiry that it has made it challenging for me to fully construct my own response to it. It’s landscape - conceptual, spatial, and emotional combined with the potency of its rigour feels limitless. It leaves me unsure whether I can even begin to scrape its surface, let alone offer a glimpse that does it justice.
Structures, which ran from 31 May - 15 November 2025 is the second exhibition in a trilogy under the Worldmaking theme, following Ecospheres in 2024.
It examines the human in relation to the built environment.
The exhibition “Structures” was a provocation - an invitation to consider how structures shape our lives beyond their literal forms. It asked us to sense structure(s) in its layered dimensions: physical, ideological, metaphysical, and metaphorical, and to recognise how these forces organise experience, reinforcing freedom, power and visibility for some, while producing dispossession, constraint, and erasure for others.
The exhibition opens with a vast mural - a static output in nature, yet one that actively situates us. Rebecca Potterton’s mural - Marks of Home (2025), functions as a map, illustrating an array of structures rooted in architectures and cultural histories of the Global South woven into the world’s fabric. Unfurling in scale, the exhibition carries a subtle sense of movement and poetry: the mural as map, as aerial view. Setting the tone for what is considered material, and how materials and infrastructure carry meaning. This is echoed in the couscous installation of the scaled model of an ancient Algerian city by Kader Attia, Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009) the work points us to the ever-present tension inherent in structures and the fragility of cultural heritage marked by cracks and decomposition; movement made visible over time.
As you move through the exhibition the different sections unfold different aspects of people and place.
Now standing in front of a striking canvas. Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s, Panel Beaters Wall III (2023) canvas was made in a panel beater’s workshop on the ground floor of his studio in Cape Town. Mechanics, equipment, and people converge in a poetic register. Imprints, footprints, and everyday business reveal an interactive artwork. The outlines of people and structure linger - histories impressed into a surface that bears witness to what was present, even more so as the building has since been repurposed. The artistic choice to strip away in the making of the work gestures toward what is archived versus what is allowed to fade.
As one moves through the exhibition, the textures of structures unravel in rhythm. Each work anchors us in contemplation of how structures shape human lives, while also yielding moments of tenderness, poetry, quiet resistance and resilience. The works remain in dialogue with one another allowing meaning to accumulate through resonance.
Suddenly, the gaze is forced downward, toward the small sculptures by Hajara Waheed, This Is Not a Door, Just a Sense There Might Be One at Some Point 1- 2 (2019). This change in scale demands attention. Her work often examines the networks of power that shape everyday life. The artist draws our attention to how authority operates not only at monumental scales, but through ordinary and humble forms. The door, an object of daily utility becomes a vessel for hope, for passage, for imagining movement where constraint once dominated.
Then I was seized by tender light. Jellel Gateli’s , Serie Blanche (1996), a photographic series that endeavours to capture the spirit of a place with light as the protagonist. The photo series of light pulled me inward, framing me within the breath of light, as though I were standing inside the place itself.
The exhibition culminates in the mystical and the ritualised everyday. Prayer clouds emerge alongside the tapestry mapping routes and dreams. They are pathways of resistance. Igshaan Adams’, Gebedswolke (2025), site specific installation of shimmering wire prayer clouds collapse the real and the surreal. They hover as fragile vessels of belief, vulnerability, and unresolved desire.
Across the hall from here are terraced hills where land, people and rain gather in ritualistic prayer and song. The MADEYOULOOK-artistic collaborators , Dinokana (2024) installation includes the constructed natural environment (hillside and rain curtain made from clippings of the resurrection plant) and sound installation. It functions as a memory repository of intergenerational memory and indigenous knowledge systems. It emphasises the inextricable link between land, water, people and prosperity. The 20-minute sound installation was ethereal. It is punctuated by invigorating Johannesburg thunderstorms; motion carried through voices, land, and weather itself.
An unexpected extension of this exhibition experience is the accompanying exhibition booklet which included an interactive section with a few prompts. I share one of the prompts and my response to below:
The prompt says landscape, however it conjured for me a memory of a structure that left an impression on me, which is the grape arbor in my grandmother's yard. It is one of my earliest examples of beauty. It was situated in our backyard but had this unobstructed line of sight to some of the front yard and the street. We spent countless afternoons here - lazing about, in conversation, enjoying food or tea, granny braiding and styling our hair, playing with cousins and friends, reading, and receiving guests.
This prompt returned me to an embodied childhood memory where structure, ritual, and belonging were first felt. In doing so, it sharpened my understanding of how structure and memory interact. Not as static recall, but as something lived and continually activated.
It is not merely a rudimentary memory of grapes growing in my grandmother’s garden, among other fruit trees. Each time I hold or taste a grape, I am sensing something more expansive; the familial structures that shaped me. The rituals of conversation beneath the fruit tree, the cadence of voices, pauses, and presence.Memory here is not abstract - it is tactile, relational, and held in the body. Structure, in this sense, becomes a container for intimacy, imagination and inheritance.
For me, the exhibition ultimately asks how we, as humans, carry structures within ourselves. How they are internalised, embodied, and reproduced through the built environment, social relations, and socio-economic systems that shape everyday life.
Having had this opportunity to reflect I would like to put forward my own question to you? Do we tend to ourselves before we tend to structures, or do we attend to structures in order to care for ourselves?
As I move through the world, I hope to remain attentive to what is not immediately visible. To ask why we live the way we do, and who these ways serve. Structures may appear immovable, even insurmountable, yet they are also fragile - shaped by choice and design , and capable of being change. If anything is to endure, let it be our commitment to building life-affirming worlds rooted in care and sustainable futures.
All visitors can enjoy a visit to exhibitions at JCAF by pre-booking online.
JCAF -Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation
No 1 Durris Road
Forest Town
2193
Johannesburg, South Africa
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