April 14, 2026 - July 01, 2026
274 Preller Street, Muckleneuk
African ReUnion: A Celebration of Pan-African Imagination and Unity
The Exhibition African ReUnion: A Celebration of Pan-African Imagination and Unity, hosted at the UNISA Art Gallery, aims to celebrate and affirm Africa’s creative agency. Curated by Tshegofatso Seoka from the UNISA Art Collection, the exhibition underscores the University of South Africa’s position as a leading institution in African scholarship culture and creativity, reinforcing its role as a site of critical thought, access, and transformation on the continent.
African ReUnion: A Celebration of Pan-African Imagination and Unity emerges as a contest of constructions of African Identities that have historically situated Africanism and African aesthetics within a homogeneous identitarian framework. Instead, the exhibition celebrates the notion of plurality within the reformulation of African Identity through a dialogic and inclusive methodology that positions the continent and African identity as a continuously unfolding and becoming epistemological discursive.
Through the inclusion of artworks from various artists from the African continent and the diaspora, such as Yinka Shonibare, Aïda Muluneh, Kudzanai Chiurai, Cyrus Kabiru, Owusu-Ankomah, Paa Joe, alongside South African artists such as Bonnie Ntshalintshali, William Kentridge, Dimakatso Mathopa, and Makamatele Robert Moramaga, among others, the exhibition serves as a site of dialogue and fertile ground for the expansive formation that places African Modalities and knowledge systems at the forefront of the development of strategies that aim at the reclamation of African futures, African epistemologies, and the restoration of Africa’s own voice.
Reframing the role of art as a living archive, African ReUnion: A Celebration of Pan-African Imagination and Unity is centered around the artwork African ReUnion (2025), a recent addition to the UNISA Art Collection, generously donated and conceptualized by Dr Thebe Ikalafeng. Painted by the artist Mark Modimolle, the artwork African ReUnion (2025) anchors the exhibition’s engagement with Pan-African imagination, unity, and the ongoing project of African renewal. With its central motif, an empty chair, the artwork African ReUnion foregrounds the ethos of the exhibition, inviting all Africans to take part in the act of nation- and continent-building.
The donation by Dr. Thebe Ikalafeng upholds UNISA's position as the largest university on the continent and serves as a symbol of access, thought leadership, and a commitment to scholarship dedicated to repairing African epistemological disenfranchisement. By promoting African artistic voices, the exhibition highlights notions of unity, inclusion, and African non-hierarchical coexistence. It represents a gathering of voices, ancestors and descendants, icons and ordinary Africans, Nkrumah, Maathai, Adichie, Mbeki, Senghor, Diop, and countless others; it is not a lament of what was lost, but a declaration of what we will never again surrender.
