Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa has opened a new group exhibition that looks back at six years of its own residency programme. Titled Were It Not for Shadows ..., the show runs from 12 November 2026 until 29 August 2027 on the third floor of the Cape Town museum, and brings together six artists based in the city who each spent time in the Koyo Kouoh Atelier between 2019 and 2025.

The participants are Kemang Wa Lehulere, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Thania Petersen, Igshaan Adams, Unathi Mkonto and Berni Searle. Each is represented by work that grew out of their residency: Wa Lehulere's Laying Bare from 2019, Gunn-Salie's Line in the Sand from 2020, Petersen's KASSARAM from 2021, Adams's Not Working; (Working Title) from 2022, Mkonto's TO LET from 2023 and Searle's On Site from 2024. Installations, tapestries, sculpture and photography sit alongside one another in a display curated by assistant curator Phokeng Setai, with assistance from fellows Bulelwa Kunene and Reem Aljeally.

The title comes from a line in Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, in which the Japanese writer argued that without shadows there would be no beauty. Setai said the exhibition pays tribute to the quiet stretches of inquiry in which ideas are formed, nurtured and changed, and to the unseen labour of the studio before work reaches the public. A second framework comes from the Crystallist Manifesto, written by members of the Crystallist School in Khartoum, which treats art as a crystallisation of many viewpoints rather than a single fixed reading.

Site-specific commissions and interventions in the museum's architecture form one strand of the show, while engagements with embodied histories, the aftermath of political change and the spiritual life of South Africa's multicultural landscape form another. The exhibition continues the museum's series of research-led shows centred on artists from Africa and its diaspora, and its programming is supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.