A crisp winter morning finds me walking toward the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), the cold sharp against my face. The old tram shed and electrical substation in Forest Town hum with quiet intent, setting the tone for what lies ahead. JCAF has never felt like a gallery to me; it’s more an ideas laboratory where art, research and technology mingle at an almost meditative pace. The exhibitions here are slow-burning contemplations, designed to be felt as much as understood; an invitation to encounter art, not simply consume it.
This visit finds JCAF in the middle chapter of its three-year Worldmaking series. Last year, Ecospheres explored the natural world, its ecosystems, fragility and our place within it. Next year, Futures will look forward, toward techno-realities and imagined landscapes. But for now, the focus shifts from soil to scaffolding as it probes the built environment, its politics and poetry.
Structures is arranged in three pulse points – situatedness, infrastructures and typologies; but walking through it feels anything but academic. In situatedness, Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s haunting Panel Beaters Wall III peels back the layers of a Cape Town workshop, preserving fingerprints, fumes and faded paint. Each trace is a fragment in a tactile archive of time. The mood shifts noticeably as I turn and encounter Kader Attia’s cityscape, delicately constructed from couscous, offering a quiet reflection on how vulnerable culture can be when it’s reduced, borrowed, or overlooked.
In infrastructures, and further on to my left, it’s Matri-Archi(tecture)’s Building Africa: The State of Things! that catches me off guard, drawing me in with its elegant, quiet force. It reimagines architecture as a living archive. The Matri-Archi(tecture) Collective, comprising 26 inter-generational African and diasporic women, believes that historical archives fail to represent our identity as Africans.
© Matri-Archi(tecture) and African State Architecture (photo credit: Graham De Lacy)
Their installation explores this idea through the lens of two of South Africa’s most symbolically charged buildings: the Union Buildings and the Constitutional Court, recasting them as contemporary sites of reckoning and reflection. Visitors are invited to become part of the work, inscribing their thoughts into books resting on podiums, layering personal memory over national myth. And in the process, actively creating a new, more inclusive archive from excerpts of lived experience.
Outside, Stephen Hobbs’s installation, Mnara (Tower), contemplates unfinished structures scattered across African cities, and the sense of suspended momentum they hold. He finds a certain pleasure in their incompleteness, he says, an unresolved pause, filled with the weight of what could be.
(photo credit: Graham De Lacy)
In typologies, I pause at MADEYOULOOK’s Dinokana installation and take a seat, literally. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t just speak at you but with you, asking thorny questions. Repatriated from the 2024 Venice Biennale, it asks: if the land is returned, how does humanity rebuild itself with nature?
Commissioned by the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture for La Biennale di Venezia
As I leave, Structures lingers, both urgent and grounding. It reminds me that architecture is not neutral. It is the skin of our politics, our memories, our hopes. And in a city like Joburg, still negotiating its shape and meaning, that question, ‘what kind of world do we want to build?’ feels more pressing than ever.
Timed tickets for Structures at JCAF are free, but booking is essential. The show runs until 15 November 2025. Take an unhurried hour; let the foundations beneath your sense of place shift a little. Joburg, after all, is still under construction.
