Zeitz MOCAA: All You Need to Know

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) is one of Cape Town’s leading art galleries dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Housed in the now-iconic Silo Building at the V&A Waterfront, the gallery boasts both a permanent exhibition and temporary, rotating exhibitions, all contributing to the preservation and promotion of African artists. Here’s what you need to know.

About Zeitz MOCAA

Zeitz MOCAA is a public, non-profit museum, whose main goal is to showcase and promote African contemporary art. The museum encourages intercultural understanding and resonance in its art selection, and generally strives for am environment of free speech and human rights support.

First opened in 2017, the iconic Grain Silo building at the V&A Waterfront was transformed into a functional silo space for the museum. Due to this, the museum space has a industrial feel, and is a truly unique gallery space in the context of Cape Town.

The Zeitz MOCAA is supported by the Global Council, an international group of art philanthropists, and the American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA, who aim to advance the awareness of African art in the United States.

Current Exhibitions at Zeitz MOCAA

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Other Side of Now

The Other Side of Now is a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, running from 22 August 2024 until 14 September 2025.

This exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war around the world. Giving a voice to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance.

Nguyen’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories, and opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures.

Rooted in memory and narratives, Nguyen’s practice explores alternate forms of healing colonial inheritance and the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His work blends fact and speculation through the collapsing of time, materialising as an interdisciplinary practice of objects and moving image. Nyugen is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Various Artists: SALA

SALA is a collective exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, on show from 15 December 2023 until 12 April 2026. Curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg in collaboration with the Zeitz MOCAA & the University of the Western Cape Museum Fellows 2023, the exhibition features the work of 17 artists, with the overarching theme of ‘stay’.

A word shared among many Nguni languages in Southern Africa, sala is part of a call and response between people parting ways – hamba kahle, a well-wishing of safe travels to those who are departing, and sala kahle, welcoming those who are staying behind to ‘stay well.’ The exhibition invites attendees to stay well, and to reimagine the functions and intentionality that a museum exhibition serves.

Sala invites guests to linger in the space and to experience things with slowness. The exhibition offers multiple entry points for attendees to explore, to question and to challenge subconscious biases.

Various Artists: Selections from the Collection

The Zeitz MOCAA Permanent Collection was established in 2015 and is focused on contemporary artistic practices from Africa and its global diaspora. It consists of over 500 objects, ranging from works on paper and canvas, photographic prints, sculptures, video works, installations and more.

Featuring artists from multiple countries, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Madagascar, the United States, Kenya, and Sudan, the collection is a rich testament to the diversity of contemporary practices from the continent and beyond.

A selection of the pieces in the permanent collection are on display at Zeitz MOCAA, until 4 April 2027. The collection is thoroughly contemporary and addresses several relevant discourses in Africa and the world today, like migration, human rights, visibility, memory, and desire.

Rita Mawuena: One Must Be Seated

One Must Be Seated is a solo exhibition by Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan, and is on display at Zeitz MOCAA from 13 November 2024 until 19 October 2025. Deeply rooted within her Ghanaian culture, Benissan’s practice has particular focus on the reimagining of the royal umbrella and stool, both symbols of Akan chieftaincy.

Through tapestry, sculpture, photography and video, Benissan’s work highlights and celebrates the rich traditions of Ghanaian culture, with a focus on Asante customs. These customs are delicately reimagined by Benissan through archival material, honoring past chiefs and artisans of traditional Asante crafts.

The exhibition layout simulates the enstoolment tradition with each successive gallery symbolising a stage in the process. Prompted by the new film, One Must Be Seated (2024), from which the exhibition takes its title, attendees are invited to be nominated and confronted by the ancestors.

Rita Mawuena Benissan is a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist, is on a mission to reimagine the royal umbrella, transforming it from a mere protective object into a potent symbol of Ghanaian identity. With a profound passion for art and cultural history, Rita collaborates with traditional artisans to breathe life into archival photos, immortalizing individual figures and communal scenes while embodying the beauty and power of her people. Benissan currently lives and works in Accra, Ghana.

Nolan Oswald Dennis: UNDERSTUDIES

UNDERSTUDIES is the first major South African museum solo exhibition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, and is featured at the Zeitz MOCAA from 8 October 2024 until 27 July 2025.

The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the Dennis’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach. Interested in the fraught history of scientific representation and intervention, the artist encourages us to think of artworks as models, diagrams, hypothetical annotations and simulations rather than sculptures, drawings and installations.

For Dennis, the exhibition environment often serves as a site for experimentation, producing long cycles of work rather than individualised objects. Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice.

Nolan Oswald Dennis is a Zambian-born, Johannesburg-based artist Their practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific approach. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.

Audio Tours at Zeitz MOCAA

The Zeitz MOCAA offers complimentary audio tours, accessible from your mobile device. Dedicated to showcasing art from Africa and its diaspora, the self-guided audio tours feature in-depth information about the museum’s exhibitions and architecture. This includes commentaries from leading artists, curators, architects, designers and art practitioners.

For those interested in the architecture of the space, the complimentary Architectural Tour gives visitors an insight into the industrial past of the Grain Silo building and its reformed architectural design by Thomas Heatherwick.

Please ensure that you bring your own earphones for the tour.