Oupa Sibeko in Conversation with Voni Baloyi

Interdisciplinary artist Oupa Sibeko joins HEAT Festival curator Voni Baloyi for a live conversation about Straatmate, a body of work shaped by performance, play and the streets of District Six.

Working across performance, painting, drawing and participatory games, Sibeko traces the textures and residues of the city — from paving stones and potholes to cracks, puddles and sites of absence. Using techniques such as frottage, he transforms these surfaces into abstract works that map both a physical and psychological geography of Cape Town.

The conversation will explore Sibeko’s commitment to play as an artistic and political gesture, and how decay, memory and contested relationships to land might open new possibilities for repair, connection and collective imagination. These ideas resonate closely with HEAT 2026’s theme, Ctrl + Z, which considers how art can help us undo inherited ways of seeing and make space for deeper forms of repair.