Cape Town - Exploring childhood nostalgia and cultural identity through fine art, Our Cape Town Heritage (OCTH) will present its fourth exhibition in collaboration with the Bo-Kaap Cultural Hub tonight.
A Glimpse Between Memoirs: Childhood Nostalgia showcases the artworks by local artists Shaunez Benting and Whaleed Ahjum.
The opening will take place on First Thursday, today, at the Bo-Kaap Cultural Hub from 5pm-10pm, and will run until March 10.
The OCTH was formed by three women of colour in 2022, who saw the need in the community to tell and preserve stories of heritage and culture by marginalised artists, said OCTH director of operations and communications liaison, Muneera Davids.
Since its establishment, it has hosted exhibitions with patrons attending from all over the City.
The common theme and purpose throughout was to explore Cape cultural history and heritage through visual art and education, Davids said.
“With a team of five, OCTH offers practical support to these artists, while at the same time creating awareness and preserving culture and heritage through education.”
On the upcoming exhibition, she said: “As children and youth, we’re always looking for a sense of belonging, and this exhibition explores that sense of re-establishing and recovering the connection with the Cape Malay heritage. We want to highlight the importance and impact of heritage and culture, looking at how every cultural tradition, we take for granted, shapes our identities.”
Ahjum, who often works under the pseudonym Drake Wolfe, said the pieces created for the exhibition were a means to reconnect with his heritage and background, and to pay homage to his mother, Sharifa Ockards.
“It has been a rather personal exploration as my connection to my Cape Melayu Diaspora heritage was through my mother – a single mother who raised my sister and me against adversity.
“She also instilled my love for art, history and resistance against oppressive institutions.
“Herself a former Art, History and Geography teacher during apartheid, rallying students during the 1976 student protests as a student teacher at Salt River High, she had kept our oral history alive.
“So, in a way, this is an homage to her as much as an artistic exploration of my heritage.”
Benting said: “My familial roots consist of Cape Town, District Six, Salt River, Woodstock and my childhood transpired on the Cape Flats’ sub-economic township of Bonteheuwel. My work depicts a lost era and the nostalgia of happy places and innocent childhood spaces in the prevailing shadow of apartheid, unbeknown to the children at play at the time.”
On Friday, the exhibition will be open from 9am to 6pm, on Saturday from 10am to 6pm, and on Sunday from 10am to 6pm.