William Humphreys Art Gallery presents Elias Ditaba Sewape’s solo exhibition Ditaba – 80 Albert Street: A 40-Year Survey of Painting and Printmaking

 

Kimberley, South Africa – A major solo exhibition by South African artist Elias Ditaba Sewape, titled Ditaba – 80 Albert Street, brings together an expansive body of work spanning over four decades. This landmark presentation offers a rare and intimate encounter with Sewape’s enduring artistic practice, tracing the evolution of his visual language through both painting and printmaking.

Ditaba – a Sepedi word meaning “news” positions the exhibition as a site of transmission and circulation, where artworks operate as carriers of information, memory, and lived experience. Rather than a fixed archive of stories, the exhibition unfolds as an active relay of social, political, and personal records – attuned to the rhythms of everyday life and the broader currents shaping South African society.

Anchored by works produced at and around 80 Albert Street, a site central to Sewape’s creative journey, the exhibition situates place as both a physical and conceptual point of departure. This address becomes more than a studio, it emerges as a generative site of observation, production, and continuity, where the artist’s visual language has been shaped over time.

Across paintings and prints, Sewape demonstrates a remarkable command of material and form. His practice moves between figuration and abstraction, often layered with symbolic nuance and textured surfaces that evoke both immediacy and depth. The works reflect a sustained engagement with themes of labour, community, spirituality, and resilience rendered through a visual language that is both introspective and socially responsive.

 

Ditaba – 80 Albert Street also foregrounds Sewape’s significant contribution to printmaking in South Africa, marking, importantly, the first solo exhibition of his career despite a practice spanning over four decades. Through this medium, he explores ideas of multiplicity, circulation, and accessibility -qualities that resonate with the very notion of “news” as something shared, reproduced, and collectively received. Crucially, this logic of circulation is anchored in the historical weight of 80 Albert Street, once an apartheid-era administrative site where Black South Africans were required to obtain and carry pass books – documents that regulated movement, controlled labour, and inscribed the body within a bureaucratic regime of surveillance.

In this context, Sewape’s engagement with printmaking becomes both formal and political: the reproducible image echoes the stamped pass, the duplicated document, and the enforced dissemination of state authority. Yet, in a profound act of reclamation, the artist redirects these associations, transforming a site of restriction into one of expression, where printed images circulate not as instruments of control, but as vehicles of memory, resistance, and self-representation. The works thus operate as counter-documents, unsettling the legacy of apartheid’s paper trails while reimagining print as a democratic medium through which histories can be re-authored and collectively held.

This exhibition stands as both a retrospective and a living communiqué – an evolving body of work that continues to speak across time and context. It affirms Elias Ditaba Sewape’s place within South Africa’s artistic landscape as a practitioner deeply invested in the relationship between image-making, place, and the ongoing production of meaning.

 

About the William Humphreys Art Gallery (WHAG)

The William Humphreys Art Gallery (WHAG) in Kimberley is a national art museum under South Africa’s Department of Sport, Arts and Culture. Established in 1952, the gallery houses a significant collection of South African, African, and European art. WHAG presents a dynamic programme of exhibitions, education, and public engagement, supporting both emerging and established artists while fostering critical dialogue and accessibility in the visual arts

Exhibition Details:
Title: Ditaba – 80 Albert Street curated by Chepape Makgato
Artist: Elias Ditaba Sewape
Mediums: Painting and Printmaking
Opening reception date: 28 May 2026
Venue: William Humphreys Art Gallery

For media enquiries, interviews, or further information, please contact:
chepape@whag.co.za

For RSVP please contact kagiso@whag.co.za