Zeitz MOCAA presents A Protea Is Not a Flower, an exhibition with Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode responding to the life and works of Gerard Sekoto, Bessie Head and Don Mattera. Curated by Zeitz MOCAA's Khanyi Mawhayi, the exhibition opens on 16 October 2025 and runs until 15 November 2026.
A Protea Is Not a Flower is a multigenerational conversation between South African artists and writers whose lives and works contend with the complexity of the exilic experience. Contemporary visual artists Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode respond to the lives and works of painter Gerard Sekoto and writers Bessie Head and Don Mattera, three important figures of the Black Modernist Intellectual Movement in twentieth-century South Africa. The exhibition’s title is inspired by Mattera’s poem Protea…, which addresses colonialism, apartheid, and patriotism through the metaphor of South Africa’s national flower. If a protea is not a flower, then what is it? From 1774, the Protea’s seeds—indigenous to South Africa—were spread to geographies across the world, including England, New Zealand, Australia, and California, USA for commercial purposes. Like the artists in this exhibition, the protea is a plant with a complex root system—able to survive under harsh conditions and varying climates.
The exhibition considers the parallels between the various forms of exile experienced by Sekoto and Head abroad, and the internal isolation that Mattera endured within South Africa. What does it mean to be excluded, stripped of your connection to others physically, emotionally, and artistically? What does it reveal about the quality of choices available to Rhode and Shadi in choosing to live and practice in Europe? What kinds of exilic compromises1 did these contemporary artists make to build lives for themselves in Berlin, Germany? Drawing on the written correspondences of Sekoto, Head, and Mattera, as well as their modernist artistic output, the exhibition explores the spectrum of personal and political expression, navigating themes of exile, identity, and memory. It maps constellations and communities of exchange, revealing the profound connections between these protagonists, even in the absence of any documented encounters.
Including paintings by Sekoto alongside installations, photography, and film by Shadi and Rhode, the exhibition proposes a conceptual and formal dialogue between the three artists. Sekoto’s Le Massacre de Sharpeville/Sharpeville Massacre (1960) meets Shadi’s Maropeng (2022), confronting the viewer with the entanglement of history and the present. Rhode’s Twilight (2012/2013) pays homage to Mattera while responding to the rhythm and repetition of Sekoto’s Sketch for Song of the Pick (n.d.). Both contemporary artists present newly commissioned murals that reflect on the multiple forms of exile threaded through the exhibition.
The artists all push up against, paint on, and carve into walls. This is made literal in Rhode and Shadi’s practices as they transform these structures of containment and concealment into ephemeral works that speak to migration, inclusion, home, and exile. The exhibition stages an intergenerational conversation wherein the foreign communes with the familiar, asking: what happens when we allow ourselves to look Beyond the Gate (1946-47), beyond borders, and beyond the national identities inherited from coloniality?
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.
meet the artists
Lerato Shadi
Lerato Shadi is a South African artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Shadi graduated from the University of Johannesburg in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art and completed her Master of Arts in Spatial Strategies from the Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin in 2018. Working across performance, video, and installation, Shadi interrogates assumed colonial narratives and critiques practices of historical erasure as mechanisms of violence against marginalised peoples. She challenges the politics of representing Black womanhood, centring her lived experience by using her body in repetitive interventions. She employs time and duration to reflect on labour and its value in society, with her actions and gestures functioning as devices that speak to the ritualistic quality of the mundane.
Shadi has held multiple solo shows dating since 2007 with recent presentations including, Tsela e e motsopodia, Blank Projects, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Maropeng, Galerie im Turm, Berlin, Germany (2022). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions both internationally and locally, including Everything Is True—Nothing Is Permitted, Brutus, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2025); We, The People: 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2024); Who We Are: Reflecting a Country of Immigration, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2023), among others.
Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Rhode intervenes in the built environment of the city, drawing attention to the often-unseen histories and social conditions of a site and its surroundings. Taking inspiration equally from youth street culture and art history, Rhode’s artistic practice treats the city wall as an expanded canvas. He employs a range of visual strategies and media— including painting, performance, and photography—to create surprising and critical artworks that refuse stasis and remain in motion, defying any singular definition.
Rhode has held numerous solo exhibitions since 2003, with recent presentations including, Fragments in the Sun, Noack Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2025); African Dream Root, Lehmann Maupin, New York, United States (2023); Robin Rhode, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2022). Rhode’s recent group shows include Corps et âmes, Bourse de Commerce, Paris, France (2025); Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, United States (2025); Ring of Fire, Kistefos Museum, Oslo, Norway (2025); Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection, Victoria and Alfred Museum, London, United Kingdom (2024), among others.
About Bessie Head, Writer
Bessie Head (b. 1937–1986), was a South African novelist whose life was marred by periods of isolation and exile. Born to a white mother in a mental hospital in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Head lived with two foster families before being remanded into state care again during her adolescence. She was sent to Santa Monica’s Home, an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban, where she completed her high school education. She was denied a passport, forcing her to leave South Africa on a one-way exit visa to Botswana in 1964. She worked briefly as a teacher, and then as a labourer on a government owned farm, before becoming a full-time writer. She published her first novel When Rainclouds Gather in 1968—the proceeds of which she used to build her home, affectionately named ‘Rainclouds’ and establish a garden in Serowe. In 1979, Head was granted citizenship in Botswana, passing away in 1986, having never returned to her birth country of South Africa.
Bessie Head is best known for her novels When Rainclouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973). Her body of work was, and continues to be, a reflection not only of her experience as an exiled mixed-race woman in a region disfigured by colonial and racial violence but also speaks to the experiences of many Black Southern Africans attempting to make and sustain life amid tumult and difficulty.
About Don Mattera, Writer
Don Mattera (b. 1935–2022) was a South African writer, poet, journalist and activist. Born in Sophiatown, he spent his formative years at a convent school in Durban before returning to Sophiatown to live with his grandmother. In his youth, Mattera became involved with one of the most notorious gangs and was eventually. It was during this time that he found his voice as a poet and activist, later joining the African National Congress Youth League as a political activist. His writing, both as a poet and journalist, was sharply critical of the apartheid government, resulting in banning orders and a series of house arrests between 1973 and 1982.
Mattera published several books, including They Passed This Way and Touched our Lives (2008), Inside the Heart of Love (1997), Memory is the Weapon (1987), and Azanian Love Song (1983). In 1986, he received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from the Swedish PEN Club. He worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times, The Weekly Mail, and The Sowetan and in 1990 served as editor of The Mail and Guardian Arts and Culture section. Mattera received numerous awards and accolades, including an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of Natal as well as the University of the Witwatersrand.
About Gerard Sekoto, Painter
Gerard Sekoto (b. 1913–1993) was a South African artist and musician, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Black South African modernist painting. Born at a small German Lutheran mission station just outside Transvaal, Sekoto chose a career in the arts, and moved to Sophiatown in 1938. In 1940, Sekoto became the first Black artist to have an artwork acquired by a South African museum, the Johannesburg Art Gallery. In 1947, Sekoto left South Africa for Paris under self-imposed exile, seeking to establish himself in what he saw as the centre of the art world. He passed away in 1993 in Paris, France.
Towards the end of his life, Sekoto gained international recognition for his work, in part due to a monograph published by Barbara Lindop. He was designated a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga for his contribution to the arts by the South African government. In 1989, Sekoto was also granted an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Recent exhibitions of Gerard Sekoto’s work include African Modernism in Africa, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (2023); Common, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2023); When We See Us, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa, (2022); Handle with Care, Javett Art Centre, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa (2022), among others.
Image credits:
Lerato Shadi. Photograph by Select Image. Courtesy of Zeitz MOCAA.
Robin Rhode. Photo by Tilman Vogler. Courtesy of the artist.
Bessie Head. Photo supplied.
Don Mattera. Photo supplied.
Gerard Sekoto. Photo by George Hallett.