THK

The File Cannot Be Restored

Positioned within HEAT Festival’s theme, Ctrl + Z, The File Cannot Be Restored borrows the language of digital failure to pose a question: what if the past cannot be undone — not because it is fixed, but because it continues to live within the present? The exhibition brings together the work of Nicola Brandt, Sahlah Davids and Tshepiso Moropa to examine how memory persists across landscapes, archives, inherited traditions, and everyday acts of making.

Working across photography, collage, and textile assemblage, the artists approach history as a contested and continually unfolding terrain. Nicola Brandt’s practice critically engages with the entangled legacies of German colonialism, National Socialism, and Apartheid, examining how power is inscribed within landscapes and the intersections of private and public memory. Through her photographs, she draws attention not only to what history reveals, but also to what remains absent or deliberately obscured.

Sahlah Davids turns to textiles, upholstery, and needlework to explore the oral histories of her Cape Muslim heritage and the lasting social realities of apartheid. Drawing upon the domestic labour and artisanal traditions passed through generations of women in her family, her material language transforms beads, pins, fabric, and upholstery foam into vessels of memory. These familiar materials speak simultaneously of hardship, resilience, faith, and home, revealing how personal histories are inseparable from broader political and cultural narratives.

Tshepiso Moropa similarly begins with fragments: archival photographs, oral histories, dreams, and folktales, reassembling them into intricate collages and immersive installations that imagine the archive as a living, evolving space. Rooted in African historical memory and storytelling traditions, her work dissolves the boundaries between past and present, constructing poetic narratives that foreground ancestral knowledge, collective memory, and the possibilities of reimagining history.

Rather than seeking recovery or resolution, the exhibition embraces fragmentation, layering, and material transformation as ways of understanding how memory endures — continually rewritten through the stories we inherit, the places we inhabit, and the futures we imagine.

Moropa, Brandt & Davids

Tshepiso Moropa

Tshepiso Moropa (b. 1995) is a self-taught collage artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. With an academic background in Psychology, Linguistics, and Research, her artistic practice engages deeply with African historical archives and oral histories.

Moropa’s work begins in fragments: archival images, memories, folktales, and dreams, which she assembles into hand-crafted collages that feel at once ancient and futuristic, personal and collective. Working across both digital and analogue forms, she constructs visual narratives that reimagine the archive not as a fixed record but as a living and evolving space of possibility. Rooted in the oral traditions of her childhood, her compositions carry the emotional weight of stories passed down through generations, using symbolism, repetition, and abstraction to explore ancestral knowledge, inherited memory, and the dreamlike spaces where these ideas converge.

Her practice increasingly extends beyond the flat surface into immersive installations, video art, and sculptural forms such as peep-boxes and dioramas. These intimate and exploratory spaces act as portals into poetic and emotive archives where the past and present are in conversation.

Through her work, Moropa examines the relationship between memory, history, and contemporary identity, forging narratives that bridge temporal and spatial divides. Her process balances careful research and intuitive experimentation, celebrating the beauty of the past while inviting reflection on its resonance in the present.

Moropa has received significant accolades, including the Out of Africa Award (2022), Contemporary African Photography Prize (2024) and the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography (2025). She has garnered notable international attention, and has been included in presentations at Paris Photo, with Michael Hoppen Gallery, in From the Ground Up, Galleri Image, Denmark; and at 1-54 London with THK Gallery.

Moropa has participated in the RE-Memory Virtual Residency (2022) followed by the PESP4 Art Creating Programme (2024). Moropa’s work forms part of global collections, including the Ditau Collection, Workers’ Museum Collection, and notable private collections.

In February 2026, Moropa presented a solo project at the Tomorrows/Today section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, coinciding with A Grammar of Belonging, a group exhibition at THK Gallery.

Moropa is currently featured in Museum Rietberg’s A Kind of Paradise in Zurich, Switzerland. This will be followed by a presentation of her CAP Prize-winning works at the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography, Switzerland.

Nicola Brandt

Nicola Brandt is a Namibian-German artist working at the intersection between memory studies, landscape, ecology, and feminist and queer theory. Much of her work is focused on transfiguring male power—its political arrangements and landscapes. In turn, she celebrates entanglements of pleasure, solidarity and rebellion.

Brandt is the author of the monograph Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art pub- lished with Bloomsbury in 2020. She has contributed to publications including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), the reader of the 13th Edition of the Bamako Biennale (2022), co-edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole.

She is the founder and series editor of the artists’ and writers’ residency Con- versations Across Place (CaP). The first CaP volume (2021) was published

with Greenbox Publishing in Berlin. The artist holds a doctorate in Fine Art from the University of Oxford and is currently based between Germany and Namibia.

Sahlah David

Sahlah Davids (b. 1998) is a Cape Town-based visual artist whose practice centers on textiles and beadwork.

In her studio practice, Sahlah Davids uses a material language of textiles, upholstery, and needleworking to explore the oral histories of her heritage and strong affiliation to the realm of religiopolitics. Cape Town born and raised, Davids has described her methods of creation as the product of the blended learning and trades of the Cape Muslim community, specifically the elders within her family.

Davids looks to the prevalence of seamstressing as a profession, unpicking the layered and complex social narratives that led to its adoption by so many in her family and community. For the artist, it represents a memory that many can relate to – the “coloured” as the artisan, the tailor, the carpenter, and the seamstress. A shared profession of plight and adversity, but also a position of power and strength that many women of colour have stepped into throughout their lives. The bead, the pin, and the ruching of the fabric become an assemblage of these memories. Through a sense of materiality each object holds meaning. The pin that hurts but binds, the upholstery foam and material as a physical reminder of place called home, and the scarf serving as a symbol encompassing all her culture and the essence of her identity. The distortion, abstraction, allowing the materials to be almost engulfed by the pinned beads, representing a growing realisation of what it means to exist generationally within the aftermath of apartheid.