Finding Power in the Pretty

Pretty Serious is Cape Town’s Women’s Month group exhibition exploring femininity as a space of imagination, joy and resistance.

WORDS Neyani Mphephu PHOTOS Courtesy of ORMS School of Photography

What happens when you take beauty seriously? When softness becomes a strategy, and joy a form of resistance? These are the questions at the heart of Pretty Serious, the second annual Women’s Month exhibition from ORMS School of Photography and Art School Africa.

Following the inaugural Many Selves in August 2025, the exhibition returns, but the mood has shifted. Pretty Serious explores the playful, excessive, tender, ridiculous, stylish, emotional and joyful dimensions of femininity – qualities so often dismissed as frivolous, yet used here as a delicate art of resistance. It is, at its core, a light feminine touch applied to the long, heavy conversation around womanhood. Invited artists engage with femininity as a space of imagination, exploring what it means to find power in softness, romanticise the everyday, embrace excess, or perform femininity on one’s own terms. The result is a show that resists easy categorisation, leaning into the messy, glorious contradictions of being a woman in 2026.

Curated and produced by Buchanan & Co., a Cape Town-based strategic advisory focused on contemporary art from Africa, the exhibition brings together a wide range of practices spanning painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage and fibre art. Featured artists include:

• Alexia Smit
• Alka Jiven
• Celeste Jacobs
• Edinah Chagwedera
• Inge Prins
• Kauthar Kamish
• Khanyisa Buthelezi
• Kristen McClarty
• Zarah Cassim
• Nina Turok Shapiro
• Lauren Hendricks
• Martha Kubule
• Myra Brown
• Sanell Aggenbach
• Antonia Steyn
• Reem Aljeally
• Sera Holland
• Sharday Swanepoel
• Sundus Saad
• Zimkhitha Mabonga

From established names to emerging voices, the roster reflects a generation of Cape Town-based practitioners redefining what feminine creativity looks like on their own terms and in their own media.

The collaboration brings together three forces with a shared investment in South Africa’s creative future. ORMS has anchored the creative retail landscape for more than 30 years, serving photographers, filmmakers and artists with equipment, fine art printing and educational initiatives such as the Cape Town School of Photography. Art School Africa, a registered non-profit, equips the next generation of artists, curators and writers with the skills to build sustainable careers through education and mentorship. Buchanan & Co., founded by Julia Buchanan, whose background spans Zeitz MOCAA, Norval Foundation and the Harvard University Center for African Studies, guides the project’s curation and production with research and relationships at its core. Together, they have made the Women’s Month exhibition an annual fixture on the Cape Town art calendar.

Pretty Serious is on view until August 2026 at ORMS School of Photography. ormsdirect.co.za | @ormsctsp

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