Berman Contemporary

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Berman Contemporary Berman Contemporary is a pioneering gallery dedicated to women artists.
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Through mentorship, visibility, and sustained support, we nurture creative practices and amplify women's voices. Berman Contemporary is rooted in the growing understanding of the cultural richness and diversity of South African contemporary art. The gallery’s collection centres on a vibrant group of artists living and working in South Africa.

Introducing Arizona based artist Samantha Vo for The Logic of Matter.For Sam, matter speaks. It is a repository of memor...
01/10/2026

Introducing Arizona based artist Samantha Vo for The Logic of Matter.

For Sam, matter speaks. It is a repository of memory, inheritance, and gendered labour. Working between rigidity and softness, permanence and transformation, she tends to what materials resist, retain, and what they might reveal.

Her practice is a process of listening—allowing matter to shape the work as much as she shapes it—where overlooked histories emerge through making. Here, material and making become forms of knowledge: embodied, situated, and continually (re)discovered through touch, tension, and time.

Occupying the space where personal and historical experiences become physical, Sam’s feminist material practice asks us to consider how knowledge
becomes embedded in the things we make.

Discover more about Sam and her practice Samantha Vo-Limón

The Logic of Matter: Feminist Material Practice
5 March – 3 May 2027

Meet Pilot. A wheel that will never turn, a lid that will never seal... the sea’s discards, reassembled into something t...
26/09/2026

Meet Pilot. A wheel that will never turn, a lid that will never seal... the sea’s discards, reassembled into something that holds itself like a monument.

In After the Tide, Thirza Schaap’s sculptures leave the photograph behind and take on physical form. The images make this debris beautiful; the objects, up close, stay stubbornly what they are.

Thirza Schaap
Pilot, 2026
Mixed material plastic sculpture
37 × 5 × 12 cm

After the Tide · on view until 28 November
📍 Berman Contemporary, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town

The Women’s March to Freedom: Alf KumaloOn 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to Pretoria’s Union Buildings, ...
19/09/2026

The Women’s March to Freedom: Alf Kumalo

On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to Pretoria’s Union Buildings, led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, delivering petitions bearing more than 100,000 signatures against the pass laws.

Drawing on this historic moment, MBR PROJECTS in collaboration with Jonathan Ball and Exclusive Books, presented an exhibition at FNB Art Joburg 2026 drawn from Alf Kumalo’s extensive photographic archive. His images do more than document women’s political participation; they form part of the visual record through which that history is remembered and understood.

For Berman Contemporary, participating in conversations beyond the walls of the gallery is an important extension of our programme. We were therefore delighted that our gallery manager, Lindiwe Mngxitama, was invited to conceptualise and facilitate a conversation with Nonhlanhla Kumalo, Hlonipha Mokoena and Heidi Sincuba, reflecting on Kumalo’s work and legacy through questions of women, representation and political memory.

A look back at a conversation that took the gallery’s engagement with women’s histories and representation into the wider cultural programme of FNB Art Joburg — on a day that also marked what would have been Alf Kumalo’s 95th birthday.

Image Credit: TREVOR STUURMAN for THE MANOR

Thirza Schaap makes walks South Africa’s coastline collecting what the ocean hands back, then arranges the debris into s...
14/09/2026

Thirza Schaap makes walks South Africa’s coastline collecting what the ocean hands back, then arranges the debris into still lifes and photographs them.

That double-take is the work. In this artwork ‘’Lost’’, objects from the sea are arranged like treasure: beautiful at first glance, a reckoning on the second. Because it doesn’t decompose. It just waits...

Thirza Schaap
Lost, 2020
Archival inkjet print on Felix Schoeller, adhered to Dibond
57.5 × 85 cm | framed 59.5 × 87.5 × 3.5 cm
Edition of 7

After the Tide on view until 28 November 2026
📍 Berman Contemporary, Cape Town

Artist Thirza Schaap transforms plastic gathered from the shoreline into sculptures that pull you in with their beauty, ...
09/09/2026

Artist Thirza Schaap transforms plastic gathered from the shoreline into sculptures that pull you in with their beauty, then reveal the waste beneath.

Thirza Schaap
Assemblage in white No. 2, 2026
Ocean plastics and white coating, unique piece
63 x 33 x 38 cm

On view until 28 November 2026
Berman Contemporary, Cape Town

03/09/2026

What remains when everything else has been discarded?

In After the Tide, Thirza Schaap works with plastics collected from coastlines, transforming consumer residue into carefully composed still lifes that hold beauty, tension and balance in unexpected places.

At the exhibition opening, Candice Berman spoke about the ideas and materials at the heart of Schaap’s body of work.

On show at Berman Contemporary, Cape Town | 1 August – 28 November 2026

Featured in After the Tide by Thirza Schaap at Berman Contemporary.THIRZA SCHAAPMonochrome, 2020Archival inkjet print on...
02/09/2026

Featured in After the Tide by Thirza Schaap at Berman Contemporary.

THIRZA SCHAAP
Monochrome, 2020
Archival inkjet print on Felix Schoeller adhered to diabond
75 x 50 cm
framed 77.5 x 53 x 3.5 cm
Edition of 7 ( #1/7)

On view until 28 November 2026
Berman Contemporary, Cape Town

Featured in After the Tide by Thirza Schaap at Berman Contemporary.

THIRZA SCHAAP
Wrap, 2020
Archival inkjet print on Felix Schoeller adhered to diabond
45 x 30 cm
framed 47.5 x 33 x 3.5 cm
Edition of 7 ( #2/7)

On view until 28 November 2026
Berman Contemporary, Cape Town

Featured in After the Tide by Thirza Schaap at Berman Contemporary.

THIRZA SCHAAP
Musselmania, 2017
Archival inkjet print on Felix Schoeller adhered to diabond
45 x 30 cm
framed 47.5 x 33 x 3.5 cm
Edition of 7 ( #1/7)

On view until 28 November 2026
Berman Contemporary, Cape Town

Installation views from After the Tide by Thirza Schaap, as we count down to the opening this Saturday at Berman Contemp...
27/08/2026

Installation views from After the Tide by Thirza Schaap, as we count down to the opening this Saturday at Berman Contemporary.

The exhibition brings together photographic works and selected sculptural arrangements from the series, offering a closer encounter with the materials, forms and compositions that shape Schaap’s practice.

The opening will also include a special presentation by VIVIERS Studio, bringing the two practices into dialogue through a shared interest in transformation, materiality and the beauty of the unexpected.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you into the exhibition this Saturday.

After the Tide
Saturday, 29 August | 11:30–14:30
Berman Contemporary
Silo 5A2, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town

RSVP via the link in bio.

Address

Shop 5A2, Silo District, V&A Waterfront
Cape Town

Opening Hours

Monday 09:00 - 17:30
Tuesday 09:00 - 17:30
Wednesday 09:00 - 17:30
Thursday 09:00 - 17:30
Friday 09:00 - 17:30
Saturday 09:00 - 16:30

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