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Tuesday 10:00 - 17:00 Wednesday 10:00 - 17:00 Thursday 10:00 - 17:00 Friday 10:00 - 17:00 Saturday 10:00 - 17:00

Hazendal Gallery

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Hazendal Gallery

The Gallery at Hazendal Wine Estate
A space for emerging and re-emerging artists. Now showing: What the Body Keeps.

27/08/2026

NOW SHOWING | Soft Escapes

"Each moment of time is a beginning."— James Carse

Soft Escapes explores play as a restorative mode of being in an increasingly productive and outcome oriented world. Inspired by James Carse's concept of the infinite game, the exhibition considers play, imagination, and moments of pause as forms of engagement grounded in active curiosity and possibility.

Across painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices unfold through acts of looking, wandering, and making. Moving between the sensory and the speculative, these works create spaces where play becomes a shared language for exploring meaning, inviting reflection on interconnectedness and healing.

Rather than a detachment from reality, Soft Escapes proposes temporary departure as a form of renewal, encouraging us to pause, move beyond measurement, and rediscover the joy of presence and play.

Featuring works by
Amber Skye Alcock | Andrea Du Plessis | Gabriele Jacobs | Max Kuijers | Oda Tungodden

12/08/2026

ARTWORK FOCUS | Umhambi - Lisakhanya Ngqoba

Woven from memory and water, Umhambi holds the shape of a home that has learned to keep moving. Square patterns rise across the surface like blankets laid across a flooded floor — grey with white lines, the bright checks of ityali, the soft familiar weight of everyday comforters pressed into service as barriers against the rising water.

The weaving becomes a way of archiving what mops and cloths could not hold back. Each intersecting thread recalls a blanket once soaked through, wrung out, and laid down again — objects that carried both flood and family, that softened the edges of displacement while bearing its weight. In recreating these patterns, the work traces a history of a travelling family in search of greener pastures, movement folded into the very structure of the fabric.

The choice of material is deliberate: the same cloth used for amabhayi, the white blankets braided and beaded across the shoulders of Xhosa women, and for traditional skirts. Here, the blanket is not background but body — it holds warmth, holds stories, holds people together, whether wrapped around visiting family or laid across a flooding threshold.

Umhambi sits in the space between shelter and survival, asking what it means to keep an archive alive through labour, repetition and care. The water may recede, but the blankets remain — folded, washed, and returned to use, carrying the physical and metaphorical weight of every home the family has had to remake.

"The blanket becomes archive. It holds warmth, holds stories, and holds us together — whether during family visits or during floods." — Lisakhanya Ngqoba

07/08/2026

ARTWORK FOCUS | Growing a Ribcage – Jesse Martin Davis

Originally developed as part of Jesse Martin Davis's graduate body of work, Growing a Ribcage takes on new resonance within What the Body Keeps. Transforming a reclaimed dining table into sculptural ribcages, Davis explores how memory is carried through both the body and the materials that shape our lives. Once a place of shared meals, conversation, and silence, the table holds traces of domestic history, becoming a metaphor for how objects, like bodies, preserve lived experience.

The ribcage itself evokes protection, care, and familial connection, while its hinged construction allows it to shift into multiple configurations, reflecting identity and healing as continual processes of becoming. Drawing on his experience as a trans man, Davis reimagines transformation as an act of agency, connecting personal identity with intergenerational histories of protection, resilience, and belonging.

"Reshaping found material becomes a way of responding to the memories inscribed in flesh, and to the possibility of repair within transformation." — Jesse Martin Davis

30/07/2026

ARTWORK FOCUS | Bianca – Katja Marsiglia

Bianca marks the beginning of Katja Marsiglia's Entangled Fragments series and became the foundation for the works that followed. Drawing on the archetype of Aphrodite, the sculpture explores ideals of femininity, beauty, and the ways women are often shaped by the act of being seen. Deliberately faceless, Bianca becomes less a portrait than an experience, inviting reflection on identity and the depersonalisation that can accompany impossible standards of beauty.

Originally sculpted in clay and cast in resin, the work was transformed by delicate resin webbing that emerged unexpectedly during the casting process. Rather than removing these fragile formations, Marsiglia embraced them as an essential part of the work. As viewers instinctively reached out to touch the sculpture, these elements gradually eroded, reinforcing the work's meditation on vulnerability, perception, and the tension between permanence and change.

"The most meaningful parts of making are often the moments I cannot fully control, when the material begins to speak for itself and for the intention behind the artwork." — Katja Marsiglia

27/07/2026

Some moments linger long after you leave.

As visitors have journeyed through What the Body Keeps | A Recent Graduate Show, the gallery has become a space for reflection, conversation, and connection. Through deeply personal works exploring memory, identity, healing, and resilience, the exhibition invites us to consider the stories our bodies carry and the experiences that shape who we are.

If you have not yet experienced What the Body Keeps, we invite you to visit Hazendal Gallery and spend time with this remarkable exhibition by a new generation of South African artists.

11/07/2026

ARTWORK FOCUS | A South African Beauty (1950)- Alexis Preller

Alexis Preller's A South African Beauty (1950) reflects the artist's enduring fascination with symbolism, identity, and the richness of African visual traditions. Rather than presenting a conventional portrait, Preller creates an idealised figure that exists between the real and the imagined, drawing on influences from mythology, ancient civilisations, and the South African landscape.

Painted during a pivotal period in his career, the work exemplifies Preller's distinctive approach to form and colour, where every element carries symbolic weight. The result is a portrait that feels both timeless and deeply rooted in place, inviting viewers to look beyond the surface and consider the many layers of beauty, memory, and cultural identity.

On view at The Wine Lounge at Hazendal Wine Estate.

30/06/2026

Introducing Jesse Martin-Davis

Jesse Martin-Davis is a Cape Town-based artist working across sculpture, wood, metal, animation, and mixed media. Their practice explores the body as a living archive, shaped by gender, family, and the social expectations that become inscribed through lived experience.

Working with found, discarded, and personally significant objects alongside clay, wax, paint, and stitched surfaces, Martin-Davis transforms materials into forms that hold memory, inherited histories, and sensation. Skin, bone, and tissue become recurring points of reference, tracing how care, vulnerability, and identity are carried across generations.

Their practice considers transformation as an ongoing dialogue with the body rather than a fixed destination. Through processes of layering, alteration, and repair, Martin-Davis reflects on the ways familial histories and embodiment accumulate over time, creating spaces where resilience, agency, and becoming remain in motion.

Discover their work as part of What the Body Keeps | A Recent Graduate Exhibition at Hazendal Wine Estate.

25/06/2026

ROOM SPOTLIGHT | What is Undone

What does it mean to rework what the body carries?

In this space, Martin-Davis engages with inherited patterns through an embodied process of reorientation. The archive is not presented as fixed or passive, but as something that can be actively revisited and reshaped through care, agency, and awareness. Memory shifts from something imposed to something authored (Martin-Davis, 2025).

Rather than seeking resolution, the work holds space for ongoing negotiation. The body continues to carry memory across generations, yet here it is approached with the possibility of choice, dialogue, and gentle transformation; a living archive in motion.

We may not always be able to control what we inherit, but we can begin to consider how we respond to it.

Featured Artist:
Jesse Martin-Davis

On view as part of What the Body Keeps | A Recent Graduate Show at Hazendal Wine Estate.

19/06/2026

Introducing Lisakhanya Ngqoba

Lisakhanya Ngqoba (born in Makhanda, Grahamstown) is a Cape Town based artist and graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Ngqoba works across photography, installation, oral history and memory, tracing routes and roots that connect personal journeys to wider questions of land, family and belonging.

Her practice is grounded in the landscapes of the Eastern Cape and Western Cape and considers the body as a living archive shaped by movement, labour and transformation. Through familial oral histories and material processes, Ngqoba reimagines the archive as something active and continuously evolving.

Working with cotton, calico, imbola and textiles referencing umbhaco and iityali, she weaves ancestral memory into contemporary form. Acts of stitching and layering in her work reflect generational labour and care, particularly that of women, creating a space where memory remains in motion and where what is fragile, unspoken and becoming is held with attention.

Discover her work as part of What the Body Keeps | A Recent Graduate Exhibition at Hazendal Wine Estate.

07/04/2026

What the Body Keeps | A Recent Graduate Show

Date: Saturday, 11 April 2026
Location: The Gallery at Hazendal Wine Estate

What the Body Keeps invites guests to engage with the body as a living archive — where memory, experience, and lineage quietly reside. Through a contemplative and immersive lens, recent graduates explore themes of trauma, resilience, and inheritance.

Featured Artists:
Olorato Makgale | Katja Marsiglia | Jesse Martin-Davis | Robyn Norval | Lisakhanya Ngqoba

Exhibition Opening
11h00 for 11h30 – 13h00 | Public & Free

Optional Experience: Sound Healing & Two-Course Lunch | R650 pp
Begin with a sound healing session (09h30 – 11h00), facilitated by Vanessa Dinkhoff, offering a moment of stillness and inward connection. Guests are then guided to the exhibition opening, followed by a two-course lunch from 12h30 at Siyalima.

Tickets for the add-on experience are available via Quicket.

A gentle, layered experience of reflection, presence, and connection with what the body holds.

https://www.quicket.co.za/events/311815-what-the-body-keeps-a-recent-graduate-show/ #/

Address

Hazendal Wine Estate
Stellenbosch
7599

Opening Hours

Tuesday	10:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	10:00 - 17:00
Thursday	10:00 - 17:00
Friday	10:00 - 17:00
Saturday	10:00 - 17:00

Telephone

+27219035034

Website

https://www.hazendal.co.za/estate-garden/art-culture/hazendal-gallery/

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