A Protea Is Not a Flower is a multigenerational conversation between South African artists and writers whose lives and works contend with the complexity of the exilic experience. Contemporary visual artists Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode respond to the lives and works of painter Gerard Sekoto and writers Bessie Head and Don Mattera, three important figures of the Black Modernist Intellectual Movement in twentieth-century South Africa. The exhibition considers the parallels between the various forms of exile experienced by Sekoto and Head abroad, and the internal isolation that Mattera endured within South Africa. The title is inspired by Mattera’s poem Protea…, which addresses colonialism, apartheid, and patriotism through the metaphor of South Africa’s national flower. If a protea is not a flower, then what is it? 

Curated by Zeitz MOCAA’s Khanyi Mawhayi.

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