Africa Is a Country | 16.12.2025 17:00
In his solo exhibition, ominously titled “We Should All Be Dead,” Eastern Cape–born and Johannesburg-based artist Khanya Zibaya charts and interprets the hidden social and spatial anomalies that shape everyday life in Johannesburg. Moving ambidextrously between photography and paper collage, Zibaya fixes his gaze on the city—a boundless metropolis rife with contradictions, both humane and grotesque. Johannesburg is a city of contrasts. On one hand, “Jo’burg,” as it is affectionately known, is celebrated as Africa’s bustling economic epicenter; on the other, it is notorious for high crime levels, pervasive violence, and creeping infrastructural decline. In his presentation at Cape Town’s Vela Projects, Zibaya meditates on these polarities by constructing a visual field of artistic analysis composed of fragments drawn from the lived experiences of the city’s most vulnerable inhabitants
