Zeitz MOCAA presents Re-enactments, a one-day symposium on the occasion of African American artist and experimental filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s major survey exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA. Drawing from the films, Sojourner (2018), its accompanying reproduction of an archival image by American photographer Billy Ray, as well as A Woman Discusses Her Photograph (2006) and The Grid (2011), this symposium thinks through re-enactment as knowledge producing, and as an integral tool towards deciphering our world and imagining new ones. Reading Smith’s intertextual and research-based practice with and against the filmic, sonic and intellectual practices of invited participants, the symposium is an opportunity for critical engagements with the cultural, historical and planetary orientations in Smith’s films, sculpted objects, and sonic landscapes. Though re-enacting is often mobilised as a method to revive public investment into historical and national narratives, this symposium seeks to unravel the speculative potential of doing, seeing and experiencing again.
About the Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted Publication
Launched on the occasion of the Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted exhibition, the publication offers critical reflections on Cauleen Smith’s work. Included are thought provoking essays by South African filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela and writer Siddhartha Mitter and a conversation between Smith and writer, filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun. Alongside a curatorial introduction by curator Thato Mogotsi, framing the exhibition’s conceptual and material journey, and texts by three Zeitz MOCAA researchers addressing its intellectual and historical contexts. The publication is designed by Daniel Rautenbach.
Date & Time
Saturday, 10 October 2026 | 2 pm – 8:30 pm
Venue
Zeitz MOCAA (Level 6, Ocular Lounge and Level 0, Scheryn Arena)
Entry
Access with standard museum admission of R265 per person.
Free to Zeitz MOCAA members on presentation of valid membership.
Meet the Participants
Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, California, 1967) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. With a BA in cinema from San Francisco State University (1991) and an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California-Los Angeles (1998). Her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction.
Smith’s works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA and the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway among others. Smith has received numerous grants and awards, including a Heinz Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her films screen internationally, and her works are in public collections around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Image credit: Artist Portrait by Joshua Franzos.
Kitso Lynn Lelliott
Kitso Lynn Lelliott practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the ‘real’ of the hegemonial order, it’s narratives and the form these took over the Atlantic during the formative episodes that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of enunciating from elision, surfacing modalities of being grounded in otherwise onto-epistemic registers. It is a presencing and voicing of emancipatory imaginaries in communion and in chorus towards ushering in more livable worlds.
In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 Lelliott won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research at the UWC and artists in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand.
Lelliott was the winner of the 2024 Henrike Grohs Art Prize, and was awarded the Brooklyn based International Studio and Curatorial Program’s Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy award for a residency in New York in 2025. In 2026 Lelliott is an artist in residence experimenting with alchemy at the Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral.
Milisuthando Bongela
Milisuthando Bongela-Davis (b.1985, South Africa) is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, cultural worker and artist. Her career began in the fashion industry but the last 18 years have seen her traverse the worlds of music, art, media and film – continually turning towards Southern African indigenous knowledge systems and storytelling modes. She was the Arts Editor for the Mail & Guardian’s Friday section and was host and co-producer of the podcast Umoya: On African Spirituality with Dr. Athambile Masola.
Her debut feature documentary, a personal essay titled MILISUTHANDO had its ‘In Competition’ World Premier at the 2023 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL and selected for MOMA’S NEW DIRECTORS / NEW FILMS programme 2023 before opening the 2023 ENCOUNTERS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL and winning an award at the Durban International Film Festival. Since then, the film has been invited to over 60 festivals between 2023 and 2026. Produced by Marion Isaacs and Milisuthando Bongela and edited by Hankyeol Lee, MILISUTHANDO is Co-Production with VISO PRODUCCIONES (Colombia) with MULTITUDE FILMS (US), CHARLOTTE COOK (US + UK), BRENDA ROBINSON (US) and D.D. WIGLEY (US) as Executive Producers.
MILISUTHANDO is the first feature length film by a South African director to be licensed by THE CRITERION CHANNEL.
Her second film, INGQUMBO, an experimental short silent film was commissioned by Neo Muyanga and William Kentridge’s THE CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA in Johannesburg.
She is an inaugural fellow of the 2020 Adobe Women at Sundance Fellowship and a 2026 Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in California.
Milisuthando is currently in the research and development phase for a new film and literary project.
She lives in Harlem, New York with her husband Warren and travels to South Africa regularly.
Dr Greer Valley
Dr Greer Valley is a scholar, curator, and writer whose work bridges museums and universities to advance inclusive knowledge production and public dissemination of arts discourse and practice. Her work focuses on decolonial pedagogy, museum ethics, and curatorial practice, presented nationally and internationally. Her ongoing research interrogates the representation of African colonial histories in institutional and exhibitionary contexts, with a focus on how museums can enact forms of repair.
As Zeitz MOCAA Senior Curator & Head of Curatorial Affairs, Dr Valley leads exhibitions, research, and public programmes focused on the art of Africa and its diasporas. She also serves as Deputy Chairperson of the Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI) and sits on the board of the District Six Museum.
Her writing has appeared across international platforms and publications, including Africa Is a Country, Mail & Guardian, and in Routledge’s Companion to African Diaspora Art History. Dr Valley’s recognitions include the University of the Witwatersrand Chancellor’s Female Academic Leadership Fellowship (2024), the Getty Foundation’s MAHASSA Fellowship (2019–2020), and the University of Cape Town ICA Curatorial Fellowship (2018). In 2022, she curated Unsettled as a guest curator at the Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal.
She holds a PhD in Art Historical Studies, a Master’s in Visual Art, an Honours degree in Visual Studies, and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture.
Evyn Banawoye
Evyn Bileri Banawoye is a curator and writer, currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Their research and artistic practice acknowledge the experiences of displacement, racialization, migration, and sexualization by archival analysis, speculation, documentary photography, and ceramics. As a researcher, they are preoccupied with somatic modes of relation that prioritize embodied approaches to research, i.e, sonic, movement, perception. Bileri Banawoye is a current master’s candidate at the University of Western Cape, where she is currently researching Togolese visual cultures. Since joining Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa as a Curatorial Research Assistant, they have contributed to the development of exhibition research and have assisted with exhibitions by Cauleen Smith, Zohra Opoku, Robin Rhode, Lerato Shadi, Rita Mawuena Benissan, and more. Bileri Banawoye has independently curated exhibitions such as Mad Black Phantasms; a contemporary art exhibition featuring the work of 9 artists, exploring interpretations of madness and racialization; also featured in Art guide Artforum. Bileri Banawoye holds two BAs from NYU College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Global Public, and an Honours degree in Visual History from the University of Western Cape. Their work has been featured in PhotoVogue and they were previously awarded the Zeitz MOCAA/UWC Fellowship (2025). Bileri Banawoye currently works as a Curatorial Research Assistant at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art.
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.
