Outside the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, a tower of scaffolding rises against the sky. This is Stephen Hobbs’ Mnara – a structure caught between construction and deconstruction, between aspiration and impossibility. The work captures something essential about African cities: the perpetual state of becoming, where buildings remain unfinished for decades, their exposed rebar reaching skyward like prayers.
Structures, JCAF’s ambitious new exhibition, takes this state of architectural flux as its starting point. The second instalment in the foundation’s Worldmaking trilogy (sandwiched between 2024’s Ecospheres and 2026’s Futures), the show poses radical questions about how we build, for whom we build, and what knowledge systems we honour in the process.
Walking through the exhibition is like entering a conversation that’s been waiting centuries to happen. Here, artists and architects from the Global South aren’t asking for a seat at architecture’s table – they’re building entirely new tables, using materials and methods that Western modernism has long ignored or appropriated.
Take Kader Attia’s astonishing Untitled (Ghardaïa), which reconstructs an entire ancient Algerian city in couscous. The choice is both playful and ephemeral. This staple grain, now globally consumed, becomes a meditation on cultural heritage’s fragility. Surrounding prints show Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon – modernist masters who liberally borrowed from North African architecture without acknowledgement.
“How have indigenous forms of artistry, tradition and knowledge contributed to architecture and everyday life in the Global South?” asks curator Clive Kellner. “When we think of architecture, what do we think of? We tend to think of Western architecture, and its practice and profession are Western. But we live in an African country.”
The exhibition unfolds across three interconnected sections that flow into each other. “Situatedness” explores how buildings emerge from specific cultural and geographical contexts. “Infrastructures” examines architecture’s relationship to power and ideology. “Typologies” reveals the sensorial qualities that make spaces sacred or profane, communal or alienating.
Iranian-born Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s Panel Beaters Wall III is a literal layered work, demanding closer inspection. The, Cape Town-based artist has peeled history off the walls of an auto repair workshop, extracting layers of paint that hold decades of human touch. Fingerprints, hand marks, exhaust fume residue – all preserved like an archaeological dig through time. The work gains extra poignancy from its backstory: the workshop has since been demolished for gentrification, making this artwork the only trace of the labourers who once animated that space.
Matri-Archi(tecture)’s “Building Africa: The State of Things!” is architecture as feminist practice. The collective, led by Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk and comprising 26 intergenerational African and diasporic women, has created an installation that interrogates two of South Africa’s most symbolically loaded buildings: the Union Buildings and the Constitutional Court.
“We’re really trying to understand the memories and imaginaries that are superimposed into these buildings,” says Jurczok-de Klerk. The work invites visitors to become co-authors, writing their impressions in books placed on podiums designed to subtly echo the South African flag. Previous visitors’ annotations create layers of collective memory – some celebrating these spaces as symbols of democracy, others questioning whose democracy they represent.
The exhibition refuses to separate architecture from its social and spiritual dimensions. MADEYOULOOK’s “Dinokana,” transplanted from the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, fills a constructed environment with an eight-channel sound installation drawing on Bahurutshe and Bakoni histories. Rain songs mix with field recordings and family memories, while the resurrection plant – umazifisi in isiNdebele – appears as a symbol of resilience. Here, architecture becomes a vessel for cultural memory, challenging the Western notion of buildings as neutral containers.
David Goldblatt’s photographs provide historical grounding, his lens capturing how South African buildings have served as instruments of both oppression and aspiration. Churches, monuments, and domestic spaces reveal what Nadine Gordimer called “an extraordinary visual history of a country and its people.” Yet even Goldblatt’s documentary approach contains a radical proposition: that buildings are never just buildings – they’re crystallised ideology.
The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica takes this idea to its logical conclusion with his reconstructed installation. Inspired by Rio’s favelas, his Penetrável (penetrable) structures invite visitors to walk through, over, and around them. Architecture becomes a verb rather than a noun, a process rather than a product. The materials – sand, fabric, stones – shift underfoot, making each visitor a co-creator of the space.
Igshaan Adams’ work maps another kind of movement. His Gebedswolke installation traces Cape Town’s “desire lines” – those informal paths carved by residents navigating around apartheid’s spatial planning. Using satellite imagery transformed into tapestries, Adams reveals how human movement can be a form of resistance. His suspended wire sculptures hover above like “prayer clouds”, suggesting aspirations caught between earth and heaven.
Throughout the exhibition, materials themselves become protagonists. Jellel Gasteli’s photographs capture light moving across North African mosques, revealing how traditional architectures work with natural elements rather than against them. Rebecca Potterton’s entrance mural presents 45 illustrations of Global South vernacular architectures, each one a masterclass in building with rather than despite local conditions.
This attention to indigenous knowledge feels especially urgent now. As Kellner observes, contemporary African cities are filling with “corporate glass, steel” buildings that ignore local climate and culture. Like a challenge to visitors to imagine alternatives.
Those alternatives are already emerging. Young African architects are rediscovering sustainable practices encoded in traditional buildings – from termite-inspired ventilation systems to locally-sourced materials that actually suit African climates. The exhibition suggests these aren’t quaint throwbacks but sophisticated technologies that Western architecture would do well to study.
Wolff Architects’ specially commissioned Reading Room embodies this collaborative future. Described as “a table with walls, a library without shelves,” it creates space for what Manolo Callahan calls “convivial gathering as a structure of contemporary knowledge creation.” Here, the exhibition’s ideas can be debated, extended, reimagined.
Stephen Hobbs’ tower returns to mind—that Mnara (Swahili for tower) that greets visitors. It references Tatlin’s unrealised Monument to the Third International, the Tower of Babel, and the embedded scaffolding in West African mud mosques that allow communities to replaster their sacred buildings annually. It’s a structure about structures, caught between utopian ambition and practical necessity.
This captures the exhibition’s essential tension. Structures doesn’t offer easy answers or romantic returns to pre-colonial building. Instead, it insists that reimagining our built environment requires more than new materials or technologies. It demands recognising that people themselves can become infrastructure – that the most sustainable buildings might be those that bend to human need rather than forcing humans to adapt.
As African cities face rapid urbanisation and climate crisis, Structures suggests the solutions aren’t in importing more glass towers or fake Italian piazzas. They’re in the knowledge systems that helped communities build with their environments for centuries – knowledge that’s been there all along, waiting to be recognised, honoured, and adapted for contemporary use.
The exhibition continues at JCAF in Forest Town, Johannesburg, until 15 November 2025. Booking is essential. In a city rushing toward an uncertain architectural future, it offers a necessary pause – a chance to ask not just how we build, but why, and for whom. The answers, it suggests, have been hiding in plain sight, in the very ground beneath our feet.
