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Curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg in collaboration with the Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellows 2023: Fine arts graduates Evaan Jason Ferreira from South Africa and Bulelwa Kunene from Eswatini, educator Mona Eshraghi Hakimi from Malawi, visual anthropology graduate Pauline Buhlebenkosi Ndhlovu from Namibia and Mozambican architect and urban planner Ana Raquel Machava.

Sala invites you to stay. A word shared among many Nguni languages in Southern Africa, sala is part of a call and response between people parting ways – hamba kahle, a well-wishing of safe travels to those who are departing, sala kahle welcoming those who are staying behind to ‘stay well.’ Zeitz MOCAA welcomes you to stay with seventeen artists in our permanent collection; stay with us to re-imagine the museum as a new embodied space.

At the heart of Sala is a set of questions. What is a museum and who is it for? What are the inheritances of the museum and how do we make it anew? What are the ‘ways of seeing’ that are encouraged by a museum? How do we wish to see art, ourselves, and each other in a museum? We invite you as the audience to explore with us the limits and possibilities of the museum and to take part in this reflection and questioning.  

We welcome you to sit with us and with your senses – stay and be within your own bodies. Sala invites you to linger, to experience things with slowness. It offers multiple entry points for you to explore, to question and to challenge. You are invited to map the ways you occupy the museum. This invitation is extended through our exhibition guide and the process of map-making that asks you to engage playfully and critically with the relationships between meanings of works and images.

Our curatorial process was consultative. It started with a series of internal conversations about how our institutional identity is shaped by our collection and how we can re-connect with the artwork we hold as well as with our varied audience. We interrogated the intentionality of a collection exhibition, to what extent it could include institutional critique, and how it can act in ways to ‘repair’ and offer alternative spaces for ‘being.’