Zeitz MOCAA is delighted to announce IMPRINT, the current iteration of the Koyo Kouoh Atelier at Zeitz MOCAA, bringing three Cape Town-based publishing collectives as residents in the second-floor gallery: (B)andWi(d)th, Medupi Publishing, and Creative Knowledge Resources. IMPRINT, co-curated by Nathalie Viruly, and Dr Greer Valley, and supported by Bulelwa Kunene, Angela Muritu and Emme Pretorius, will be on view from 1 October 2026 to 2 April 2028 on Level 2 Elevator Side of the museum.
IMPRINT is the mark left behind: the residue of thought made material, the pressure of a hand, an inked fingerprint, a method, an encounter. It is both trace and action—the impression that remains after something has passed through, and the act of pressing into the world so that something might endure, circulate, or return in altered form. Minor changes in major institutions. An imprint names a publisher, a lineage, a signature, but also the temporary conditions under which ideas gather, settle, or regain elastic form.
The collectives use the space as a site of production and experimentation. Structured in six-month iterations—sometimes overlapping, sometimes in isolation—the residency invites each collective to bring its own research trajectories, styles, and material concerns. Some tend towards critical theory; others publish poetry, workbooks, websites, or scores, or work across radio. Where the collectives differ, they share modes of borrowing, rewriting, and unlearning in pursuit of making ideas tangible.
Publishing, here, is noisy. It refuses the singular form. It includes artists’ books, other books, non-books, anti-books, quasi-books, instruction manuals, compilations, cassette tapes, musical scores, postcards, playing cards, posters, objects, ephemera, sound, radio, and pamphlets—forms made to circulate, made to move, made to propose new sequences for engaging publics. Each carries an imprint: of labour, relation, and the conditions from which it emerged.
To be a publisher is to tend to ideas and to forms of publicness. It is to devise forms through which knowledge travels—through airwaves, hands, tongues, and unknowns—without certainty of endpoint or interpretation. For some, it is to speak from the margins and build platforms as a force of agency where none previously existed. For others, it is to carry the urgencies of stance and attitude, and compose forms that linger on the skin, the mind, the inner ear, or the retina.
This impulse is not new. Local histories of independent publishing and pamphleteering speak to the same compulsions to organise communities and shape new grammars of becoming within, and against, dominant cultures. Publishing is an inherent political proposition, carried forward through infrastructures both fragile and resilient—and here, authored by the collectives through the full weight of their work.
By centring publishing—and especially self-publishing and multiple voices—rather than a single artist, the Atelier looks beyond the primary exhibitionary impulse of the museum. It turns towards the supplementary, the auxiliary, the otherwise, and the subtext: towards what becomes possible when critical cultural production is treated as central rather than peripheral.
In doing so, the Atelier unsettles the hierarchies of curatorial work, taking its cues instead from editorial and self-instituted forms: spaces where methods leave impressions, where traces of work are preserved or made finite, and where critique itself becomes a form of inscription. This includes a series of xeroxed readers for circulation, as well as reading groups, debates and discussions. Additionally, there is The Daily, a collaborative curatorial consciousness unfolding through submissions from the resident collectives, the curatorial team, fellows, with an invitation extended to the public. These ideas refuse the spectacle of the singular event in favour of radical informality, ad hoc gatherings, and methods that reflect the collectives’ own forms of publicness, authorship, and relation to the Museum.
As a groundbreaking institution dedicated to promoting and preserving contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, this not-to-be-missed exhibition season reflects Zeitz MOCAA’s commitment to producing and presenting cutting-edge contemporary exhibitions and art historical knowledge, enhancing the careers of Africa’s most talented artists in the 21st century and beyond, strengthening its education programmes, and ensuring access for all.
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.
