Cape Town’s Most Thoughtful Arts Festival Returns

Taking time to weigh in on the materials for art making.

WORDS Mary Corrigall PHOTOS Michael Hall (Everard Read), Domenic Singh-Gorin (Ecletica Contemporary), Raynier Matthee (Oscar Henning)

Consuming art at art fairs or via social media has become a high-speed activity. The Heat Winter Arts Festival is encouraging visitors to zone in deeply on a few select works of art, with a ‘slow looking’ campaign framing its visual arts programme this year. Of course, as this festival — now in its third year — takes place from 6 to 15 August across over 15 venues in Cape Town’s city centre, there is a lot of art to take in. However, as it lasts over nine days, there is enough time for people to linger, revisit and savour art.

Guided walkabouts through each location, led by curators Nkgopoleng Moloi and Voni Baloyi, will offer participants the opportunity for thoughtful observation and in-depth discussions with selected artists.

Heat Winter Arts Festival was established in 2024 in an effort to stimulate art viewing, buying and cultural activities during a time of year typically thought of as ‘dead’ time in Cape Town. As an arts commentator and critic, I consider the quality of our programming a top priority. The theatre, music, digital art, dance, stand-up comedy, performance art and opera are all of a high standard, each curated by a specialist in those art forms.

Unlike most arts festivals in South Africa, our visual arts programme is the core part of our annual event and is united by a central theme titled Ctrl + Z, referring to a common drive to undo harm, restore an equilibrium or rewrite the past. The participating galleries are Aspire Auction House in collaboration with David Krut Projects, AVA Gallery, Christopher Moller Gallery, Eclectica Contemporary, Everard Read / CIRCA Galleries, House Union Block / Spier Arts Trust, Nel Gallery, SMAC Gallery, WORLDART, Untitled Art, Berman Contemporary All Women Art Gallery, 33Bree, Strauss & Co, Peffers Fine Art, THK Gallery, Thomarts Gallery, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and Iziko South African National Gallery and Iziko Old Town House.

Spending more time with fewer works but delving more deeply into them aligns with the fact that many of the works and artists participating in the festival are weighing in on everyday materials – reconsidering things in plain sight. Artists are turning to soil, plastic, rust, coffee sacks, steel, wood, and found matter to ask what objects help us recall, what surfaces reveal, and what might be reimagined when we spend more time looking.

A focus on materials is most notable in the much-anticipated preview of the second edition of Matereality at the Iziko South African National Gallery, curated by Andrea Lewis. The exhibition brings together contemporary artists from across the African continent, including Bella Knemeyer, Inga Somdyala, Warren Maroon, Sepideh Mehraban, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Bonolo Kavula, Lungisa Gqunta, Chris Soal, Unathi Mkhonto, Kimathi Mafafo, Dada Khanyisa, Elias Sime and Abdoulaye Konate. These artists’ practices foreground the expressive and conceptual possibilities of materials, from soil, cloth, wood, and metal to found objects and industrial substances. As its title suggests, Matereality explores how materials shape reality, carrying memory, identity, land, belonging, and cultural knowledge.

At the newly opened Berman Contemporary All Women Art Gallery, Thirza Schaap’s Plastic Ocean transforms discarded plastic collected from shorelines into seductive sculptural compositions. At first, the works may appear like elegant compositions or abstract arrangements of colour; on closer inspection, they reveal the residue of everyday consumption and ecological neglect. In the context of HEAT’s Ctrl + Z theme, the work asks whether we can “undo” environmental damage.

This conversation is extended at Thomarts Gallery, where Nkosinathi Thomas Ngulube’s Bags of Stories sees reused coffee bags and coffee extracts used as vessels for memory. These are not neutral materials. Coffee carries histories of trade, labour, colonial routes, and contemporary consumption, while the bags themselves suggest storage, movement, use, and reuse.

At Escape Gallery, artist Oscar Henning steers residue in another direction. His wall works, made with rust deposits on plaster, appear at first like drawings but are in fact the result of metal, moisture, and time leaving their trace. It is a quietly powerful response to Ctrl + Z: a reminder that nature, time can overwrite human interventions.

Materiality becomes a conversation between textile art and sculpture at Peffers Fine Art, with Tshepo Phokojoe in dialogue with Edoardo Villa’s steel sculptures. This unexpected pairing of works “seeks to renew attention to inherited forms – structural, historical, psychological – and to make those forms newly visible through the proximity of contrasting material languages.”

At Eclectica Contemporary, Lars Fischedick’s sculptural hanging works made from wood bring a more tactile, physical register to the programme. His practice engages matter directly, pushing materials towards tension, erosion, and disruption. Fischedick’s works share a superficial relationship with the extraordinary paintings by Ayobola Kekere-Ekun at the AVA Gallery, in that they present highly textured surfaces, although she employs fabric and acrylic to arrive at quasi-sculptural works. She positions the medium as both “collaborator and witness.”

These exhibitions remind us that materials for art are never just materials. They carry texture, labour, memory, place, and atmosphere. They change the way a room feels. They ask us to look again at what we discard, what we live with, what we collect, and what we choose to preserve.

Heat Winter Arts Festival takes place from August 6 to 15 in Cape Town. | heatfestival.org

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