Dates: 4 December 2025 – 6 April 2026
Opening event: 18:00 on Thursday, 4 December 2025
Venue: Main Building, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein
Oliewenhuis Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of Beyond Walls: Emerging Contemporary Voices, curated from the ArtbankSA Collection, on Thursday, 4 December 2025.
Unlike traditional museum collections confined to institutional walls, ArtbankSA operates as a dynamic platform that circulates emerging artists’ work through leasing and sales to collectors and the general public. This exhibition captures the essence of this fluid model, presenting works that exist in active dialogue with diverse spaces and communities.
Beyond Walls reveals urgent themes coursing through contemporary South African art: intergenerational knowledge transmission, cultural custodianship, memory’s contested territories, and identity’s continuous formation.
Artworks in this exhibition unfold through layers of remembrance and revelation. Bheki Sibiya’s indigenous symbols encode ancestral knowledge of creation and time, whilst Hlavutelo Ngobeni’s clay vessels carry centuries of ritual significance. Thalente Khomo’s haunting photograph Introspection: Usofa depicts a barefoot figure in white, identity obscured by a headdress, seated in an eerie space where childhood objects become portals to absence and memory. Asiphile Luthuli’s large-scale charcoal drawings render stress and depression visible through masterful mark-making. Tshogofatso Nkhumeleng maps survival’s labyrinthine patterns where human determination mirrors rats navigating mazes—neither background nor circumstance determining destination. Throughout the exhibition, artists grapple with what to keep from the past and what to let go, what to preserve and what to reimagine. These questions demonstrate that contemporary art is alive, moving, and always in conversation rather than fixed in place.
Beyond Walls: Emerging Contemporary Voices invites viewers to recognise their own negotiations with inheritance, memory, and becoming within these works. Whether navigating the weight of familial expectations, questioning received identities, or seeking peace amidst contemporary pressures, these artists articulate experiences that resonate beyond individual circumstance. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to witness how emerging voices are reshaping South African visual culture -not through grand declarations, but through intimate reckonings with what we carry, what we must release, and how we continually reimagine ourselves within shifting landscapes. This is contemporary art that refuses to remain static, demanding instead that we consider our own place within ongoing dialogues of survival, resilience, and transformation.
This exhibition not only offers a viewing experience but also provides an opportunity to acquire contemporary artworks. For more information about ArtbankSA and artwork acquisition, please visit www.artbanksa.org or contact Innocent Moche at apm@artbanksa.org or 051 447 9606.
The public is invited to join Oliewenhuis Art Museum and ArtbankSA for the opening of Beyond Walls: Emerging Contemporary Voices. The opening will take place at 18:00 on Thursday, 4 December 2025 in the Main Building at Oliewenhuis Art Museum.
Everyone is welcome and entrance is free of charge. Refreshments will be served.
The exhibition can be viewed until Monday, 6 April 2026. Oliewenhuis Art Museum is located at 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein and is open to the public from Monday to Friday between 08:00 and 17:00, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays between 09:00 and 16:00. A ramp at the entrance provides access for wheelchairs, while a lift provides access to the first floor. A R10 parking fee will be charged, payable in cash only, but entrance to the museum is free.
For more information, please contact the Museum at 078 968 4300 or oliewen@nasmus.co.za. Stay up to date by following Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Facebook, Instagram and X for all upcoming exhibitions and events.
