A Long Story Without End:

Visual Narratives Across Time

Exhibition: 20 February – 6 March 2026 | Cape Town

Aspire Art is pleased to present A Long Story Without End: Visual Narratives Across Time and Place, an exhibition that brings historic, modern and contemporary artworks from Southern Africa into conversation.

 

This is the inaugural exhibition to officially open Aspire’s new flagship office and galleries in Mandela Rhodes Place in Cape Town.

Stanley Pinker (South Africa 1924-2012), L’état c’est moi

 

“We are the miracles that God made,

we are the stories the earth tells,

we are the echoes of a long journey…”

                                                    -       From An African Elegy, by Ben Okri, 1992

 

Art is both witness and storyteller. Each brushstroke, form, and gesture carries within it the echoes of memory, culture, and lived experience. A Long Story Without End celebrates the continuity of artistic creativity in Africa, the dialogue across generations, geographies, and mediums that shape the ever-unfolding narrative of the continent, and those who call it home.

Left: George Pemba (South Africa 1912-2001), A Letter to my Mother and George Pemba: Against All Odds (1996) by Sarah Hudleson, 1980

Right: Kimathi Mafafo (South Africa 1984-), Voiceless II, 2019

 

 

The exhibition brings together South Africa’s 20th Century masters and pioneering Black Modernists alongside contemporary voices and a dynamic group of artists from across Africa at the forefront of current artistic practice making a significant impact today.

 

Through these works, the exhibition traces the ways artists have engaged with land and place, home and identity, culture and social history, transforming inherited visual languages into new forms of expression.

Left: Manyaku Mashilo (South Africa 1991-), Kgoro ya mathomo, 2020

Right: Gerard Sekoto (South Africa 1913-1993), The Shebeen, Sophiatown, circa 1939

Left: Irma Stern (South Africa 1894-1966), Woman in an orange headscarf, 1931

Right: Ablade Glover (Ghana 1934-), Market Queens, 2016

 

 

The exhibition celebrates art as a living archive. Each work is a chapter in an ongoing story between past and present, between personal experience and collective memory, between South Africa and the broader African continent. Together, they reveal the richness of artistic expression that transcends time, borders, and medium, and stand as a testament to the enduring power of art to connect, to question, and to imagine new futures.

 

A Long Story Without End invites viewers to witness these layered narratives, to see the threads of influence and inspiration that weave together Africa’s artistic past, present, and future. It is a story of resilience, creativity, and dialogue — a reminder that African art is not a collection of moments frozen in time, but one that continues to be written with every brushstroke, sculpted form, and woven thread. 

Left: William Kentridge (South Africa 1955-), Sleeper and Ubu

Right: Kelechi Charles Nwaneri (Nigeria 1994-), Lovers 1, 2019

 

Exhibition Details

20 February – 6 March 2026

Monday – Friday: 8:30 – 16:30

Saturday – Sunday, 21-22 February: 9:00 – 13:00

 

Enquiries & Portfolio Requests

Sarah Sinisi | sarah@aspireart.net 

 

Aspire Art, Cape Town

Ground Floor, Mandela Rhodes Place, 21 Church Street, CBD