Two exhibitions open at Bag Factory in Johannesburg, exploring dreams, the body, and city life through new work by emerging artists and curators.
On 18 June, two exhibitions open simultaneously on the second floor of the KingKong Building in Troyeville, and together they map something true about the experience of being young and making work in Johannesburg right now. They are the result of Bag Factory’s Young/Unframed programme, now in its fourth iteration, and they arrive with the kind of urgency that only comes from work that has been genuinely lived in.
Young/Unframed does something deceptively simple: it gives emerging artists and curators time. Three months of residency, working alongside each other through every phase of the creative process, from the first uncertain idea to a fully realised public exhibition. The format pairs one artist with one curator per cohort. The artist creates a new body of work; the curator conceptualises how to show it. It’s a collaborative structure that produces something different from the standard gallery model, work that has been thought through together, argued over, and shaped by genuine dialogue.
Dreamscapes In Transit
Leonardo Sitoe was born in 2000, holds familial roots in Maputo, and recently completed a Master’s in Visual Arts at the University of Johannesburg. His practice draws on Afro-Surrealism and African dream narratives, working primarily with wood and found materials to build anthropomorphic figures that sit between the human and nonhuman, objects that speak to fractured histories and to dreaming as a form of reclamation.
For 2026 Young/Unframed, the source material was his daily commute across Johannesburg. Since beginning the routine of travelling between studio and home, Sitoe’s dreams have grown increasingly marked by paranoia and spatial unease, the emotional residue of moving through a city whose geography is still shaped by the Group Areas Act.
Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, Dreamscapes In Transit translates those night-time disturbances into an Afro-surreal world, proposing dreams not as escape but as connective tissue between individual consciousness and collective memory.
Bringing this to the public is curator Muyon Mafulu, a Johannesburg-based curator and researcher whose practice engages African visual culture through memory, spirituality, and postcolonial presence.
Her curatorial interest lies in how African artists negotiate urban space and transnational circulation, how inherited pasts and emergent futures coexist in a single image. It’s a lens that feels precisely calibrated to Sitoe’s world.
Residues of Proximity: One Body, Many Parts
Mosa Anita Kaiser is a multi-disciplinary South African artist working across photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture. Her thematic territory is the body, as a site of repair, violence, wholeness, and fragmentation. Mannequins recur throughout her work as stand-ins for the objectified body, absorbing the weight of representation so that the human beneath is freed from it.
Residues of Proximity approaches the body as both archive and site of seeing. Kaiser’s central argument is quietly radical: that the body is not an object for observation but an accumulation of desires, wounds, memories, and aspirations.
Vivid colour sits alongside ghostly undercurrents of loss. The ordinary and extraordinary bleed into each other. What emerges is what she calls a “quotidian rapture,” the persistence of cultural life despite systemic erasure.
Curator Melusi Masike brings his own rigorous interdisciplinary lens to the project. A Black cultural producer whose practice draws on sartorial archives, language, research, and photography, Masike works toward understanding Setswana knowledge systems and how landscapes become sites of possibility, healing, and alternative ways of being. His curatorial eye shapes Kaiser’s work into something that feels both deeply personal and structurally considered.
Sitoe works from the outside in, the city enters through the commute and resurfaces as dream. Kaiser works from the inside out, the body holds what history has done to it, and refuses. What 2026 Young/Unframed has done, as it has in each of its four iterations, is simply make the space for that work to exist.
Both exhibitions open 18 June 2026, 6–8pm, at the KingKong Building, 8 Verwey Street, Troyeville.
Exhibition walkabout: 20 June, 11am. Find out more.
