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, Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted (2025). 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
Accompanying Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith’s first major survey exhibition on the African continent, Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted brings together the ideas, histories and imaginative possibilities that run through Smith’s expansive practice. Moving across film, installation and visual culture, the publication explores her engagement with Pan-African traditions and futures, Black cinema, Afrocentric aesthetics, Black feminism and science fiction.
The monograph includes the artist’s voice in notes presenting special insight into her relationship with the late Koyo Kouoh, as well as in conversation with British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun. Further readings of her practice are offered by South African writer, filmmaker, cultural worker and artist Milisuthando Bongela-Davis; American journalist, editor and critic Siddhartha Mitter; Nigerian-American writer, poet, artist-curator and educator Deborah Olatunji; Swati research and arts practitioner Bulelwa Kunene; and Togolese-American curator and writer Evyn Bileri Banawoye. An introduction by exhibition curator Thato Mogotsi situates Smith’s work within the geographical and conceptual terrain of the exhibition.
Together, these voices form a cross-continental conversation around Smith’s expansive practice, opening up different ways of encountering its histories and references. Richly illustrated and conceived as an extension of the exhibition, Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted reflects Smith’s ability to hold critique and care side by side.
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 R350 per person for tickets purchased via Webtickets.
Free to Zeitz MOCAA members on presentation of valid membership.
Please note:
South African and African citizens will receive a 43% discount when purchasing tickets on site at the museum, with a reduced admission rate of R199 on presentation of South African ID or African passport.
Meet the Participants
Cauleen Smith
Image credit: Artist Portrait by Joshua Franzos.
Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Smith is faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Arts and Architecture.
Smith holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2022 Heinz Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, the Ellsworth Kelly Award, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Rauschenberg Residency.
Smith’s work has 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; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others.
Her work is held in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art.
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.
AK Jenkins
AK Jenkins is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of photography, collage, material culture and sonic experiences. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, she holds a MFA from CalArts (class of ’23) and currently works between the US and Johannesburg, South Africa.
AK’s intimate work centers sport and entertainment as microcosms for the way relation is structured, statehood is formed and humanity is measured. Within this, her works operate at the intersection of the photographic archive, queer theory, and fabulation – as she creates a world where women and LGBTIQA+ athletes are perennially placed on the podium.
Her recent bodies of work examine systems of measurement (testosterone) and classification (gender), questioning how institutions make bodies visible (hyper-feminine/masculine), legible (sex) and governable (policy).
AK is also a purveyor and collector of personal archives across books, vinyl records, ephemera and other artists’ work. She is the founder of Play The Crates, an online vinyl platform that recirculates used vinyl and shares cross-continental sonic histories. Her artist studio, What’s the Word (WTW) hosts cross-disciplinary experiments, as a platform for artist-driven, work-in-progress experiments and casual gatherings.
AK’s work has been exhibited widely including Higher Pictures (NYC), Center for Photography(NY), Studio Museum (NYC), RedCat (LA), Charlie James (LA), Lumberroom (PDX, Oregon) , Melanie Flood Projects (PDX, Oregon) and Huxley Parlour (London).
Siddhartha Mitter
Image credit: Rog Walker/Paper Monday
Siddhartha Mitter is a journalist, editor and critic whose work addresses contemporary art practices and their cultural and social stakes. From 2025, Mitter was a member of the core curatorial team and editor-in-chief of the catalogue of the Biennale Arte 2026, the 61st International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025). In his writing, Mitter engages with art practices across various regions through profiles, reported features, essays and reviews. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and has written for outlets in and beyond the art field, as well as for institutional and alternative publications. Originally trained in the social sciences, he has worked in the culture field for over two decades, including as a contributor to The Village Voice, and The Boston Globe, and as a reporter for New York Public Radio. He received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2017, was the AICA-USA Distinguished Lecturer in 2023, and was awarded a Rabkin Prize for arts writing in 2024 and an Art Basel Medal in 2026. He frequently participates in programmes and dialogues with artists and the public, as well as initiatives to bolster and expand the fields of arts writing and curatorial practice. Mitter is based in New York City and travels widely.
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.
Bulelwa Kunene
Bulelwa Kunene is a researcher and arts practitioner from Eswatini, currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her work in Eswatini has ranged from festival and gallery curation to research and proposal writing for emerging art spaces and projects. In 2023, she joined the Zeitz MOCAA and UWC Museum Fellowship Programme. As a museum fellow, she completed an Honours-level research essay through UWC’s Department of Historical Studies. In 2024, she joined the ARAK Curatorial Fellowship and completed an exhibition and publication project titled A Gathering, featuring the work of 13 African artists in the ARAK collection. She is currently undertaking an MA in History at the University of the Western Cape. Her research seeks to understand the aesthetic logics of civilian-authored protest images of political ruptures on the Continent. Broadly, she is interested in pixelations, distortions, and mistransmissions, and what these reveal about our world.
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.
Image credit: Film still from Sojourner (2018) by Cauleen Smith, courtesy of the artist.
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.
