The National Arts Festival (NAF) 2026 presents the MTN X UJ New Contemporaries Award (NCA) 2025/26 curated by Amogelang Maledu. The exhibition, titled, Holding sp(l)ace for the in____between debuts at NAF from 25 June – 5 July 2026.
The exhibition makes contemporaneity a character of the exhibition. The space holding becomes an open process of negotiating ideas, while the physical place (the exhibition itself) is where intervention and collective participation becomes possible. In the opacity of the in between, refusal – a Black feminist practice – becomes the scope for engaging the artworks.
Artists, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Zara Julius, thato makatu and Unathi Mkonto each provide us with plural grammars of nestling within the milieu of contemporary life and art. Rather than providing conclusions, they provide us with provocations. In this way, the exhibition facilitates theocentric gathering. Not necessarily to evangelise, but to collectively and socially organise from within South Africa’s attendant histories. Akin to the church or the shebeen during apartheid, Holding sp(l)ace for the in____between is furtive and contemporaneous. It requires active and intentional participation versus the typical meandering experience of only looking at artworks on display at an exhibition. This is because refusal redefines aliveness in the freedom of negation, even in the wake of ongoing perennial global terrors we see today, insisting on creative practices of subjecthood and solidarity.
As part of the MTN X UJ NCA, the exhibition forms part of a competition where, amongst the four selected artists, one artist is announced as the coveted MTN X UJ NCA Artist 2025/26, winning a cash prize of R100 000.
Artist Biography
NCA Curator 2025-26:
Amogelang Maledu is an interdisciplinary art and culture practitioner working between curating, research and sessional lecturing. Her research engages, broadly, with the curatorial as a research framework particularly in Black popular cultures and sonic-based cultural practices. Maledu is currently the Curator of Art for Global Africa at Iziko Museums of South Africa and affiliated with the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Institute for Creative Arts and Creative Knowledge Resources respectively. From 2018-2025 she was a committee member for UCT’s Works of Art Committee, responsible for the institution’s art acquisitions, collection and curations.
In 2025 she was announced as the recipient of the 2025-2026 MTN x UJ New Contemporaries Curator: a prestigious opportunity awarded to a curator in South Africa. Meanwhile, in 2024 she was awarded Best Emerging Curator, conferred by South Africa’s National Institute for Humanities and Social Science (NIHSS).
NCA Artists 2025-26:
Simnikiwe Buhlungu is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa who currently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Interested in knowledge production[s] — how it is produced, by whom and how it is disseminated — Buhlungu locates socio-historical and everyday phenomena by navigating these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers via research based methodologies. Through a research-based practice, she works through sound, text, installation and publishing to map points of cognisance which situate various layers of awareness as reverberated ecologies.
Recent projects have delved into thinking how to know if something – that is not visible – is present with us. She has been thinking through a recent exploration of (im)material research, alongside a microbiologist and a chemist to understand the ways in which scientific apparati can become methodologies for sensing that which is not ocular but exists in time, across geo-historical space and within narratives and genealogies. This is extended in the shouldering of thinking of geology, genealogy, time and histories with niblings, bands, friends, fellow artists, writers, curators and 7-piece rhumba bands.
Following the last years of extensive activities, her research interests have accumulated and are sitting in a pot to stew. Such ingredients to this include: collective timekeeping (and what that might be), vocabularies of conducting, glass marbles, eustachian tube dysfunction, missing letters from texts, the phonemic restoration effect, convolution reverberation and reflecting socio-historic phenomena as its effect, silkworm and mulberry leaf distribution in South African primary schools in the early 2000s, abaci, strategies of indexing in published material, and incompetent typography.
The stew still needs about 2 more hours to come together and the heat is still low, at 79 °C.
Lately, she is (still) thinking about perpetual motion machines, writing and attempting to distribute publications via Simunye Resource Works (a publishing house that is forever yet-to-exist).
Selected projects include: hygrosummons (iter.02), Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2025 hygrosummons (iter.01), Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2024; long time lung time continuuum!!! (a conver- something), Kunst im Tunnel (KIT), Düsseldorf, 2024; suggestures among us (Interlude), Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, 2023; *dissonated underings [hic!], after- happenings and khuayarings (sithi “ahhhh!”), Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 2022. Selected group exhibitions include A Lasting Truth Is Change, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2022; The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale; Venice, 2022; Territories Between Us, South African National Gallery, Iziko Museums, Cape Town, 2021.
Buhlungu was a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 2020-2022 and graduated with a BA (Fine Arts) at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017.
Zara Julius is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Johannesburg. She works primarily with sound and multimedia installation, print and social practice; often collaborating with musicians, cultural workers and educators. Her practice is informed by her working methodology of “rapture”; asking how we might take seriously Black cultural innovation, fugitivity and performativity as sites of possibility in contexts of enduring extractivist logics. Her work involves the collection, selection, and creation of (contested) archives — real, imagined and embodied — through extensive research. She is especially engaged in thinking through the archive, the death-life matrix, and the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they may help us reconstitute Time, memory, affect, and History in the face of various unfreedoms and landlessness. Zara has recently released an art book project, A Funeral For…, and is currently in the process of developing her first work for stage.
Zara holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town (2014) and a MAFA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2021). She has been exhibiting her work internationally since 2017, including installations at Javett Art Centre UP, Pretoria, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam and Darat al Funun, Amman. Her debut solo exhibition, Whatever You Throw at the Sea... opened at the Weltmuseum, Vienna (2023-2024), where she produced a limited edition vinyl release of the same title. Zara is frequently invited to give performances and speak about her practice, including at Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat Venice (2022) school, Vienna (2023) and PARSE Artistic Research Conference (2023). Zara has developed, scripted and produced two podcast series exploring the intersection of music, history and politics in the Black world; Talking Drum (2021), and Gallo Vault Sessions (2022). She is currently in the group show, Unfinished Pasts at the Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam (2025-2027). Zara’s work has been published in Kunstmagazin PARNASS, PARSE, HERRI, Mail & Guardian, ArtThrob, and Springerin.
thato makatu is currently preoccupied by zine-making, world-building in video games, and burglar bars in QwaQwa. Their work thinks through how the domestic space interacts with our memories, how objects in the home are activated in our memories through time and the many interactions we have with these objects and with other people.
Unathi Mkonto (b. 1982 Peddie, South Africa) is a Cape Town based artist working with drawing, sculpture and installation. Mkonto is a self-taught artist and pursued a Bachelor of Architectural Studies at Nelson Mandela University. He was also a design fellow at Architecture for Humanity in Johannesburg. Residencies that he has participated in currently are TO LET at Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town; AVOID at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Stevenson. Amsterdam and Alma Martha, Cape Town.
Mkonto has also experimented with performance art, most notably in the 7th season of mentorships at the Center For The Less Good Idea. His practice sits at the juncture between art, design and architecture. Solo exhibitions include flat (2018) at blank projects, Cape Town; Juxtapositions (2023) at Stevenson, Amsterdam; Enclosed Camp (2022) at Open 24 Hours Gallery, Cape Town as well as Mkonto l Mazwana (2021) at Spaceby, Cape Town.
Mkonto has participated in local and international group exhibitions which include: If not now, then when (2022) at BKhz, Johannesburg; Seeds of the Fig (2022) at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town; Where do I begin (2022) at Stevenson, Cape Town; The Phoenix Runway (2022) at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town; Spectacle (2020) at The Fourth, Cape Town; Underline Projects (2019) at the Museum of African Design, Johannesburg; NON-EXCHANGE (2017) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, London; Young Now (2017) at Hazard Gallery, Johannesburg as well as Embrace Tiger & Return to Mountain at Alma Martha, Cape Town (2016).
Credits
NCA Sponsor 2025-2026:
MTN Foundation
NCA Project Partners 2025-2026:
University of Johannesburg
National Arts Festival
Iziko Museums of South Africa
NCA Project Team 2025-2026:
Dr Dineke Orton
Niel Nortje
Lakin Morgan-Baatjies
Surprise Nkomo
Katlego Lefine
Erin Domingo
Aneesah Girie
Rhys Gordon
Nontsikelelo Motha
Pontsho Dube
Kgomotso Moumakoe
Bongani Senne
Titus Rakgoathe
Kane Lucas
Nicholas Faure
Dina Mimi
Exhibition Title:
Holding sp(l)ace for the in____between
NCA Curator 2025-26:
Amogelang Maledu
NCA Artists 2025-26:
Simnikiwe Buhlungu
Zara Julius
thato makatu
Unathi Mkonto
- New Gallery
- Monument Building
- Daily during the Festival 09:00 to 17:00
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Daily entry to the exhibitions is free. The scheduled walkabouts have a minimal cost and booking is essential.
