The MOCAA Art Club presents Situated In Formation, an exhibition exploring how knowledge and identity take form. Through collaborative drawing, printmaking, material assemblage, and sound mapping, 13 teenagers from across Cape Town investigated how we map terrain, listen to place, and locate ourselves in relation to those who shape us. Responding to exhibitions by Nolan Oswald Dennis and Sue Williamson, members engaged making as a way of knowing—discovering that to create together is also to belong together. Situated In Formation acknowledges that we are always located—geographically, historically, relationally—and that formation is not a fixed state but a continuous process of becoming. The exhibition opens on Saturday, 1 November 2025 at Zeitz MOCAA’s BMW Centre for Art Education on Level -1 of the museum and will be on view until 28 February 2026.
Over the course of six months, members gathered every second Saturday to participate in sessions designed to observe, reflect, discuss, make and write. Working through substantive exercises and projects, they explored how knowledge and identity take form: how we map terrain, listen to place, remember what we’ve been told, and locate ourselves in relation to those who shape us. In alignment with the BMW Centre for Art Education’s objective to translate exhibitions into learning experiences, members responded to Nolan Oswald Dennis’s UNDERSTUDIES, Sue Williamson’s There’s Something I Must Tell You at Iziko South African National Gallery, and the sonic ecologies of both the UWC Cape Flats Nature Reserve and the V&A Waterfront.
Each project operated as a site of inquiry—not merely technical exercises but conceptual frameworks for understanding how representation constructs meaning. From deconstructing Western Cape landforms to carving linocut portraits of personal influential figures, members engaged acts of making as acts of knowing. Through collaborative drawing, material assemblage, printmaking and sound mapping, they investigated how place is constructed, how history is recounted, and how identity emerges through relational exchange.
The resulting work reflects an ongoing negotiation between observation and interpretation, between individual perspective and collective construction. While grounded in rigorous conceptual inquiry, the exhibition also speaks to the bonds formed within the group itself. In moments of focused collaboration, lively exchange and mutual distraction, members discovered that to make together is also to belong together—embodying the programme’s central aim to cultivate spaces of learning that value relationality, curiosity, and shared creation.
MOCAA Art Club (M A C) is a BMW Centre for Art Education programme that invites teenagers from across Cape Town to engage with contemporary art as a way of thinking, seeing, and making together. This year brought members from Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Hout Bay, Langa, Muizenberg, Plumstead and Wynberg into shared conversation—each encounter shaped by lived experiences and the city’s layered geographies.
PARTICIPANTING MEMBERS
Andre Steele
Aphelele Nyaniso
Aqhama Botha
Imaan Damon
Jorja Williams
Lucy Phiri
Nadine Fillies
Nuha Solomons
Simbongile Mpahleni
Siphesihle Madlingozi
Siyamthanda Noah Charles
Skye Payne
Yothando Boyce
Zeitz MOCAA’s education programming is generously supported by BMW South Africa.
