AVA Gallery

Three Solo Exhibitions

Terrains of Memory By Ayobola Kekere-Ekun

This work I’m creating for this show grows out of a different relationship to memory than the one that shaped my earlier practice. When I won the Absa L’Atelier Prize in 2021, the work I was making was closely tied to memory, childhood experiences, and my attempts to process the sexual traumas of my past. These new pieces do not leave those histories behind, but they approach them from a different place, one shaped by time, change, and the ongoing work of finding out what is left of me when I look at all the things that make me who I am and choose myself anyway. 

In these Zak pieces, fabric and fold become a way of thinking through growth, not as a clear departure from pain but as a more complicated process of living with what has shaped me while still becoming something outside of it. I am interested in life as a continual convergence and separation of threads or lines. Memories, grief, desire, fear, identity, longing, and self-invention. In my experience, none of these things move in a straight line. They constantly gather, loosen, knot, return, and shift in relation to one another.

The folds in the work become a kind of terrain, a landscape of pressure, repetition, and response. They hold the traces of what has been attempted, carried, reshaped, resisted, and released. In that sense, the work I’m creating is not about resolution so much as accumulation. It is in honour of the ways my life has formed through repeated negotiations between what has happened to me, what I long for, and what I am still trying to make possible. 

Sequins/Sequence by Ashley Walters (Mezzanine Gallery): 

Not all performances unfold beneath the spotlight. Some emerge in the pauses between movement, in rehearsed practice, quiet rituals, and the sustained commitment that makes performance possible. Sequins/Sequence is a long-term photographic project exploring the social and cultural life of Latin and Ballroom dance in the Western Cape. While centred on the dance floor, the work looks beyond performance as spectacle, attending instead to the

connections and expressions through which dance is lived and experienced. Here, competition, discipline, celebration, and community converge, revealing dance as both a performative and deeply social practice.

Returning to rehearsals, social dances, and competitions, these photographs linger between intuition and precision: the weight of sequins in motion, the shimmer of costumes, the exchange of glances, and the quiet concentration that accompanies each performance. The photographic series unfolds as both an archive and an ongoing relationship with the community from which it emerges. Individual photographs accumulate into a broader visual rhythm, where moments of movement, connection, and exchange resonate across the work rather than existing as isolated performances.

Presented as a sequence, the exhibition invites viewers to look beyond the spectacle of dance towards the connections, expressions, and shared experiences that sustain it. In doing so, Sequins/Sequence considers photography not simply as a record of performance, but as a means of revealing the social life that unfolds through movement.

The Theatre of Yellow Rock Fort by Kristen McClarty (Long Gallery): 

The Theatre of Yellow Rock Fort weaves together diverse artworks to create a seamless experience of space, both actual and imagined. The work originates from Bird Island—a stretch of dynamic coastline heavy with the scent of organic matter, salt, and rot. Here, blankets of yellow ochre lichen cling to the stone, while the shaded underbellies of the rocks reveal a minky pink: a womblike world of smooth curves that provides a sanctuary for play.

Constantly collecting and slowly building a narrative, McClarty’s practice investigates her own imprint on the land and the landscape’s imprint on her. Her work aims to communicate a forgotten dialogue with the land—one that is playful, ritualistic, and rich in symbols. 

Through carved handheld “shadow-throwers”, traditional woodcuts, and frottage scrolls – alongside stacked, totem-like vertical stories; shadow projections; and film – this exhibition creates a multisensory theatre of installation, movement, and sound. By subverting the traditional role of the narrator, the exhibition aims to invite the landscape to speak for itself.

Moving through the installation, the audience is invited to extend this ongoing dialogue with the land. Visitors become living actors within the theatre, casting their own shadows and disrupting the space with their presence. Ultimately, McClarty aims to transform the ordinary into the sacred, offering a complex visual language that reimagines how we connect and share space with the environment.