Cape Town's Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa has announced a new exhibition that treats African cinema as a shared infrastructure rather than a single national story. Turning Towards the Sun, curated by assistant curator Khanyi Mawhayi, brings together six artists and filmmakers and will occupy Level 4 of the museum from 11 December 2026 to 15 August 2027.

The participants span the continent and its diaspora: Ethiopian director Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, Kenyan artists Jim Chuchu and Wanuri Kahiu, African-American poet Robin Coste Lewis, and the British interdisciplinary collective The Otolith Group. Their video installations take up subjects including women's anger as a creative force, Black queer masculinities, young people navigating political upheaval, and the speculative worlds of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, alongside a genealogy of the institutions and figures that championed African film.

The project grew out of the African Film and Media Arts Collective, a network built around artist Julie Mehretu's commission for the 20th BMW Art Car. Mehretu developed the collective with filmmaker Mehret Mandefro and the museum's late chief curator Koyo Kouoh through five workshops in Lagos, Tangier, Nairobi, Dakar and Cape Town. Her Art Car will be displayed in the museum's Atrium Bowl for the run of the show, anchoring a programme that asks how artists and institutions across Africa can sustain one another.

The title borrows a defiant remark by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, who, when pressed about European readings of his films, replied that he himself was the sun. The exhibition reframes that line as a claim about attention: that looking seriously at filmmaking from Africa and its diaspora means orienting towards the continent's own knowledge and creativity, rather than measuring it against outside expectations.