5 SHOWS is the Artissima twice-monthly feature that recommends 5 exhibitions not to be missed in various geographical areas and cities around the world, chosen from the viewpoint of curators and directors of important institutions who live and work in these contexts. A different way to find guidance in the discovery of global contemporary art, from a personal and always up-to-date perspective.
The seventh focus is on Cape Town, with a selection by Khanya Mashabela, Curator at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town.
Here are the 5 exhibitions currently on display that she has chosen for our readers:
Steven Cohen: Long Life
Iziko Museums of South Africa
Up to 30.06.2026
This exhibition offers an unprecedented look at Steven Cohen’s artistic career, which has shaped the discourse of performance art in South Africa, France, and beyond. Known for his fearless exploration of identity, politics, and belonging, Cohen’s work interrogates themes of sexuality, spirituality, race, freedom, ethics, memory, and love. While engaging with universal concerns, his practice is always rooted in deeply personal narratives of love, loss, and resilience.
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Moshekwa Langa. Proxies
Stevenson
Up to 9.05.2026
Stevenson presents Proxies, a solo exhibition of new work by Moshekwa Langa, marking a decade since his first solo with the gallery in Cape Town in 2016.
From the outset of his career in the 1990s, and throughout his rise to prominence in the 2000s, Langa has been associated with a freewheeling form of artmaking that employs unconventional materials to lyrical ends, his elliptical treatment of his subject matter turning interiority into what art historians have called [‘an] intimate kind of liberating lostness’. Across Proxies, Langa continues in this vein, elaborating on the themes of familiarity and estrangement that have marked his work over recent years, offering new reflections on how memory, imagination and presence function in a psyche’s efforts to locate itself in place and time.
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Gerda Scheepers. Mallarmé’s Pillow
blank projects
Up to 9.05.2026
blank projects presents Mallarmé’s Pillow, Gerda Scheepers’ sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition’s title, itself an unlikely and intriguing associative merge, invokes the French symbolist poet Mallarmé’s understanding of meaning as emerging through the relation between form, content and language, an approach that resonates with Scheepers’ treatment of painting as a medium to be both constructed and read: an evolving process through which she continually holds the boundaries between abstraction and pictorial representation in tension.
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Pierre Vermeulen. Deeper – Deeper
RESERVOIR
Up to 22.05.2026
In his studio practice Pierre Vermeulen explores the contemporary votive, as a symbolic object of regulation. Using the ex-voto as an entry point, he considers its latent qualities of transactional fulfilment and externalisation of crisis, and redirects the power of this objectness towards desire. Drawing on Jungian psychoanalysis, Vermeulen has developed a unique visual language for expressing core themes of the unconscious structure and realisation of the self, through his own imaginative system of archetypes.
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Portia Zvavahera. Tanda rima
Norval Foundation
Up to 6.09.2026
Norval Foundation presents Tanda rima, a major exhibition by leading contemporary Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera.
Based in Harare, Zvavahera is internationally recognised for her deeply expressive and rhythmic paintings that move fluidly between the physical and spiritual realms. Drawing from dreams, memories and lived experience, her works give visual form to intimate inner worlds, resulting in richly layered compositions infused with colour, symbolism and emotional intensity.
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If you want to discover the institutions explored so far, here are the previous episodes:
Emirati Arabi Uniti | China | Norway | London | New York | Lisbon