Johannesburg is present throughout A Secret Third Thing – in its histories of extraction, in the noise of the street, and in the uneasy feeling that the city carries more than can ever be fully explained.

The exhibition features work by Senzeni Marasela, Ntsako Nkuna, Simon Gush, Smiso Cele, Siyababa, Oratile Papi Konopi and Masindi Mbolekwa. Its title points to something unresolved: a shifting undercurrent shaped by memory, consequence and the pressure of a city that has repeatedly been mined, used and rewritten.

That feeling is sharpened by the exhibition space itself. Set in a fifth-floor apartment stripped of its usual domestic character, the rooms remain connected to the life outside. Music travels up from the street. Voices and movement filter into the building. The city is never far away.

The setting also gives the exhibition a particular charge. Inner-city Johannesburg is often described from a distance, flattened into familiar stories of decline, danger or abandonment. Here, the city feels active and resistant. The artists work through its echoes, contradictions and accumulated histories, with the exhibition holding onto the idea that a place can haunt those who inhabit it while also being shaped by them in return.