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Monday 09:00 - 17:00 Tuesday 09:00 - 17:00 Wednesday 09:00 - 17:00 Thursday 09:00 - 17:00 Friday 09:00 - 17:00 Saturday 10:00 - 15:00

SMAC Gallery

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SMAC Gallery

CAPE TOWN
25 Church Street
City Centre

STELLENBOSCH
De Wet Centre
Church St In addition, SMAC maintains an active publishing initiative.

SMAC Gallery is a leading South African contemporary art gallery representing established and emerging artists from South Africa, Africa, and further afield. SMAC was established in Cape Town in 2011, with spaces in Johannesburg and Stellenbosch. With a programme focused on presenting the work of contemporary African artists, SMAC Gallery was established in Cape Town in 2011, with spaces in Johann

esburg and Stellenbosch. The gallery manages a dynamic programme of exhibitions and curatorial projects that focus on contemporary artistic discourses, while facilitating collaborative projects with local and international institutions and artists. SMAC Gallery’s art fair participation includes Art Basel Miami Beach, The Armory Show, Art Brussels, Artissima.

03/06/2026

ARTIST FOCUS | LEDELLE MOE

Ledelle Moe (b. 1971, Durban) is a Cape Town-based sculptor who investigates permanence, dislocation, and the politics of place. Travelling to specific sites, she collects earth and incorporates it as aggregate in cement, using local soil to open conversations about land, identity, and the ways political and personal histories are rooted in place. Her work has been shown internationally at institutions including MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; Semaphore Gallery, Neuchâtel; and Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas.

Moe travels to specific places, digging into the soil and embedding it into the cement forms she sculpts. Her work reflects on landscape as ground and on how the land holds memory, inviting us to consider how deeply our sense of self is shaped by the landscapes we come from. There is healing, she suggests, in slowing down and sitting with the questions that surface when we do: where have we come from, where are we now, and what lies ahead.

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01/06/2026

ON SHOW | LUIZA CACHALIA | GILDED

Gilded by Luiza Cachalia is currently on show at SMAC+ projects, Cape Town. Join us Tuesday - Friday from 10 AM - 5 PM and Saturdays from 10 AM - 3 PM.

Luiza Cachalia has long understood that cultural residue shapes our personal understandings of gender. Her interest in the societal constructs of womanhood recognises Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that femininity is consistently shaped as a site of ‘Other’ in relation to men such that femininity is defined as an object rather than a self. Where Cachalia’s earlier works meditated on those women who defied the system, who became heroines of hysteria and abject cruelty in defiance of the patriarchy, in Gilded she has turned her gaze to those who inhabit the glittering cage, whose rage within the system of patriarchal signifiers is coolly sold back to them as aspirational lifestyle.

- ⁠Natsaha Norman

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27/05/2026

ON SHOW | SMISO CELE | TO SHORE UP THE WORLD

To Shore Up the World by Smiso Cele is currently on show at SMAC gallery Cape. Join us Monday–Friday from 9 AM–5 PM and Saturdays from 10 AM–3 PM.

In To Shore Up The World, the spade is bent, broken, and welded back together again to form a distorted, surreal and non-functional version of itself. His sculptures are simple and affecting – black spades that have been extended and warped, placed on wooden bases made to follow their snaking paths. Sometimes, they adorn the walls, hanging as they might in a toolshed, but truncated or elongated, casting odd shapes on the wall. The shape of the common earthworm, an essential character in gardening because of its role in soil fertilisation, is a source of inspiration for the twisting and turning of these spades.

Orbiting and interwoven with these works are Cele’s works on paper. Layered, textured, and engaging, these mixed-media works on handmade paper can be seen as roadmaps or schematics to Cele’s sculptures, but also to the self. Delicate, considered lines cut neat paths through palimpsestic patterns, sharing space with handwritten notes and self-portraits. Exhibited here alongside his sculptures, the prints provide an exploded view of the artist’s research and speculation – a process of simultaneous surfacing and expansion.

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21/05/2026

MARELI LAL | BEHIND THE LENS

Behind the scenes of Mareli Lal’s most recent body of work, After Hours. Through a clean contemporary aesthetic, carefully staged mundane objects, and deliberate manipulation of space, Lal transforms the banal into the extraordinary, revealing the beauty and absurdity hidden within ordinary moments.

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19/05/2026

ON SHOW | NICHOLAS HALES | SHODHANA (PURIFICATION)

Shodhana (purification) by Nicholas Hales is currently on show at SMAC gallery Cape. Join us Monday–Friday from 9 AM–5 PM and Saturdays from 10 AM–3 PM.

Through his considered use of colour, soft gradients, and choice linework, Hales’ work opens up space for continued reflection, self-awareness and the surfacing of emotion.

The paintings in Shodhana (purification) avoid neat interpretation, and are the result of a process that embraces the incidental, the spiritual, and the immaterial without veering into entropy or ambiguity. At the core of the Cape Town-based artist’s practice is a balance between vulnerability and structure, colour and form. Most often, Hales works with acrylics and oils – an intuitive and meditative process of layering and mark-making.

- David Mann

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18/05/2026

ON SHOW | DANI LE ROY | STRIKE A CORD

Strike a Cord by Dani Le Roy is currently on show at SMAC Stellenbosch.

Le Roy’s work recognises both the sculptural and utilitarian elements of such a craft. Through her business Moonbasket, buyers can enjoy baskets whose bellies are crocheted by hand using h**p, twine and polyester cord, then frozen in time with bio-resin. But since then, her work has moved past domestic functionality. The medium has elaborated into imaginative motifs where laced knots can be interpreted as works of fine artistic labour.

- Drew Haller

1st Floor, De Wet Centre, 2 Church Street, Stellenbosch

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leroy

14/05/2026

FIRST THURSDAY | LUIZA CACHALIA | GILDED

SMAC+ projects hosted a lively evening on First Thursday, showcasing Luiza Cachalia’s solo exhibition, Gilded.

Gilded within the system, Cachalia’s characters leak their emotional turmoil as signifiers of disquiet from within their role as patriarchal ornamentation. Her reference imagery for these women is drawn from contemporary cinematic portrayals popular on mainstream television networks. An emotional anguish perpetuates her re-presentation of these female characters forced to colour their lives within the lines and further objectified as consumable characters in visual entertainment. In her paintings of these actresses, Cachalia unpicks the coded womanhood on display. The question her paintings encourage through this process of portrayal is not who but what is being depicted. The remediation of female characters into visual entertainment opens up a unique space for contemplating their function as objects of femininity. Objects that inform contemporary signifiers of womanhood.

- Natsaha Norman

Gilded by Luiza Cachalia remains on show at SMAC+ projects, Cape Town. Join us Tuesday - Friday from 10 AM - 5 PM and Saturdays from 10 AM - 3 PM.

65A Shortmarket St, Cape Town City Centre.

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13/05/2026

OPENING | NICHOLAS HALES & SMISO CELE

On First Thursday, 7 May, SMAC Gallery opened two new exhibitions: Shodhana (purification) by Nicholas Hales and To Shore up the World by Smiso Cele.

Thank you to everyone who joined us to experience these new bodies of work. The exhibitions remain on view at SMAC Gallery, Cape Town. Join us Monday - Friday from 9 AM - 5 PM and Saturdays from 10 AM - 3 PM.

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07/05/2026

LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA | PARDON MAPONDERA

SMAC gallery is pleased to announce that Zimbabwean artist, Pardon Mapondera, is participating in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia.

Zimbabwean artist Pardon Mapondera’s multi-disciplinary practice examines processes of transformation through material re-use and conceptual inquiry into perspective and meaning. Through the use of discarded and everyday objects, his work engages with layered narratives of history, culture, ecology, spirituality, and identity. By recontextualising these materials, Mapondera encourages critical reflection on tradition, memory, waste, and the unseen forces shaping postcolonial African experience. His practice integrates material experimentation with social and philosophical inquiry, addressing both collective conditions and individual subjectivity both collective experience and personal consciousness.

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05/05/2026

UPCOMING | NICHOLAS HALES | SHODHANA (PURIFICATION)

Join us for the opening of Nicholas Hales, Shodhana (purification), at SMAC Gallery this first Thursday, 7 May from 18h00 | 25 Church Street, Cape Town, City Centre.

‘Shodhana’ is a Sanskrit word for ‘cleansing’, ‘rectification’, or ‘purification’. In yoga, one’s conditioning or trauma is held in the chakras, or spiritual centres. Energy will move through the human energy system and purify these spiritual centres. Each centre bearing a different colour. Hales’ work uses this colour system and purification process, and can be read either as purification of an individual or the collective.

“I’m interested in imbalances in the individual, and in processes which bring about healing and wholeness, particularly meditative and contemplative modalities that quiet the mind,” says Hales in an interview with Artistcloseup.

Abstraction, then, becomes a useful genre to work with. If our minds, by nature, are compelled to make sense and to interpret, then abstraction serves as a necessary refusal of reason – the right to stop making sense of the external world, and turn inwards. But rather than simply turning away from the din of daily life, Hales is committed to the enduring ability of art to help us make sense of the world, by first prompting us to understand ourselves.

- David Mann

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Address

25 Church Street
Cape Town
8001

Opening Hours

Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	09:00 - 17:00
Thursday	09:00 - 17:00
Friday	09:00 - 17:00
Saturday	10:00 - 15:00

Website

http://www.smacgallery.com/

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