As Johannesburg’s galleries, museums and cultural spaces come into focus during FNB Art Joburg and the wider Open City programme, Keyes Art Mile will present a series of exhibitions and participatory projects across the precinct, bringing together perspectives on landscape, identity, memory and the city.

The programme spans Gallery 1, The Atrium, The Annex, BKhz, and Circa Gallery, moving between works from established collections, contemporary artistic practice and public participation. Together, the presentations offer different ways of considering how we see places, what we remember about them, and what might come next.  

Keyes Art Night takes place on Thursday, 3 September, from 18:00, at Keyes Art Mile, 21 Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, giving visitors an opportunity to explore the captivating exhibitions across the precinct, take part in the Makers Table, and experience the I Love Hate JHB zine collection on screen.

Gallery 1

STILL

Ukuthula. Wees stil.

Drawing on works from the Tortilis Collection, the exhibition brings together artists who have looked closely at the landscapes of the Namib, Sossusvlei, the Karoo, the Kalahari, and extending to the Sahara. Across generations, they have found richness in places that can appear empty, revealing the subtle variations of geology, vegetation, heat, light and distance that give each landscape its character.

But STILL also asks a second question: what is still here?

The question becomes particularly resonant beyond the gallery. Across the road, the construction of Keyes Art Mile 2.0 is transforming the ground once again. Its future landscape will include the restoration of Egoli Granite Grassland, part of the indigenous Highveld ecology progressively displaced as Johannesburg has grown.

Seen from the gallery, the construction site becomes part of the exhibition’s conversation. The landscapes inside ask us to notice what is there. The ground outside asks us to consider what has been lost. And the planned grassland offers the possibility of what might return.

In this way, STILL moves between looking and remembering, loss and renewal. It asks not only what remains within a landscape, but what we choose to see, what we allow to disappear, and what we might value enough to bring back.

More on the exhibition here.

Occupying the Gallery

In The Atrium, We Are Three marks three years of Occupying the Gallery, an initiative supporting emerging visual artists through mentorship, artistic development and opportunities for visibility.

Returning to the Keyes Art Mile, where the project began, the exhibition brings together class photographs from each iteration of the programme. Together, they form a living archive of the artists, mentors and communities that have shaped Occupying the Gallery over the past three years.

More than a retrospective, We Are Three celebrates the people and relationships behind the project, and the creative community that continues to grow from it.

Read more about We Are Three here.

Karel Nel in The Annex & Circa Gallery

At Circa Gallery, acclaimed South African artist Karel Nel presents Translucent Worlds, a new body of drawings shaped by a lifetime of travel, observation and accumulated experience. The exhibition is accompanied by True Grit, presented in The Annex at Keyes Art Mile.

Drawing on encounters with places, artists and ideas from across the world, Nel’s works explore how memory and experience shape the way we see. References to Basho, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Brancusi sit alongside his own journeys through places including Kyoto, Nara and Paris. For Nel, drawing is a way of trying to understand the world, bringing together the visible and the elusive through precise lines, shifting perspectives and vanishing points.

Visitors can experience the drawings across Circa Gallery and The Annex in the Trumpet building, 21 Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, with Translucent Worlds and True Grit offering two connected views of Nel’s practice.

An artist-led walkabout with Karel Nel will take place on 5 September at 11:15am, beginning at Circa Gallery, 2 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank.

More info on Translucent Worlds can be found here.

A new solo exhibition at BKhz

At BKhz, Johannesburg-based visual artist, curator and publisher Kay-Leigh Fisher presents a solo exhibition titled In Our Glory. Fisher’s multidisciplinary practice explores themes and narratives of becoming, examining familiar relationships with objects and the ways they reinforce ideas around racial and gendered identity.

Full details on In Our Glory here.

Making room for Johannesburg’s memories and future

The Makers Table, presented at Keyes Art Night in collaboration with Open Window and Johannesburg In Your Pocket, turns its attention directly towards Johannesburg and the people who inhabit it.

With Rosebank marking its 130th year, the workshop invites participants to reflect on their relationship with the city through a simple act of writing: creating a postcard addressed to their past, present or future selves.

Participants will use typography to create a 13-word visual poem. The first three words express what Johannesburg means to them now, while the following ten words imagine a possible future for themselves, the city and the people who call it home.

The postcards become both personal reflections and small records of the city at a particular moment, combining memory, typography and imagination.

Get more info and save this event to your calendar, here.

Zine collection

In our July edition of Keyes Art Night, we asked you to put your feelings for Johannesburg on paper. The result was a collection of I Love Hate JHB zines, each one holding a small, personal piece of the city: its frustrations, its affection, its contradictions and its possibilities.

Now, those pages come back together.

As part of this edition of Keyes Art Night, we’ll bring the full collection to life on screen, giving these small expressions of Johannesburg a moment to be seen together.

And if you made a zine, yours is ready to come home. Collect it from MESH Club on Thursday, 3 September, between 18:00 and 19:00, and come see the collection take over the screen.

Art, city and place

Across September, Keyes Art Mile invites us to look closely at the landscapes we inherit, the stories we carry, and the city we are becoming.

From the Tortilis Collection to the grassland rising outside Gallery 1, from Fisher’s explorations of identity to the memories gathered at The Makers Table, the programme moves between what is visible and what lies beneath the surface, a city seen, remembered, and imagined all at once.