Pretty Serious

6–29 August 2026
Orms Cape Town School of Photography
Weekdays, 12:30–17:00

Presented by Orms Cape Town School of Photography in collaboration with Art School Africa, Pretty Serious brings together 20 women and femme-identifying artists based in Cape Town for an exhibition centred on the pleasures, contradictions and possibilities of femininity.

Curated and produced by Buchanan & Co, the exhibition takes a playful approach to girlhood, moving between adornment, performance, vulnerability, excess, humour and tenderness. Rather than treating femininity as something to be explained or defended, Pretty Serious asks what happens when beauty, softness, pleasure and play are taken seriously in their own right.

Across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, fibre and mixed media, the participating artists approach femininity as a space for imagination, experimentation and self-definition. There is room here for the ridiculous as well as the emotional, for glamour and awkwardness, intimacy and excess. Joy, care and pleasure become ways of pushing back against the shame and restrictions often attached to feminine identity.

Presented during Women’s Month, Pretty Serious makes a case for girlhood as something worth reclaiming: not as a retreat from more serious conversations around womanhood, but as a place where play, tenderness and unfiltered joy can still carry considerable force.

Artists

Alexia Smit
Cape Town-based figurative painter Alexia Smit brings together the visual language of classical portraiture with contemporary erotica. Her saturated oil paintings consider the construction of femininity, the spectacle of the female body and the relationship between eroticism, fantasy and ideals of beauty.

Alka Jiven
Artist and architect Alka Jiven considers the relationship between architecture, materiality and feminine identity. Drawing on memories of her South African Indian heritage, her sculptural works reinterpret the sari as both cultural signifier and spatial form.

Celeste Jacobs
Kimberley-born, Cape Town-based photographer Celeste Jacobs works with 35mm and medium-format film, considering identity, memory, ritual and belonging. In Happy Wife, Happy Life II, everyday rituals of adornment become a playful way of looking at the contradictions and constructed nature of femininity.

Edinah Chagwedera
Chagwedera creates small-scale figurative sculptures that consider the emotional burdens carried beneath outward appearances. Vibrantly dressed figures and balloon-like forms conceal faces while drawing attention to vulnerability, resilience and the often invisible labour of holding oneself together.

Inge Prins
Known for her highly considered photographic compositions, Inge Prins brings a background in fine art and lens-based media to her work. Portrait of Ronel is a tender meditation on ageing, motherhood, mental illness and the shifting relationship between a daughter and her mother.

Kauthar Kamish
Cape Town-based photographer Kauthar Kamish focuses on feminine energy through power, grace and presence. Her restrained photographic practice draws attention to subtle expressions of strength and poise.

Khanyisa Buthelezi
Multimedia artist Khanyisa Buthelezi works across photography and mixed media, with a practice grounded in identity, care, women’s rights and community storytelling. Her collage DON’T STEAL MY FEMININE JOY! positions joy and peace as acts of resistance.

Kristen McClarty
Cape Town-based printmaker Kristen McClarty works primarily in woodcut and is a member of The Printing Girls Collective. Residue of self marks a departure from her established visual language, using instinctive mark-making to consider acceptance and ownership of the body.

Zarah Cassim
Working between Paris and Cape Town, Zarah Cassim considers perception, spatial illusion and the shifting relationship between reality and imagination. Her paintings move between the materiality of paint and dreamlike spaces, drawing on natural forms to create moments of uncertainty and contemplation.

Nina Turok Shapiro
Cape Town-based artist Nina Turok Shapiro works with silk-screen printing and photography, considering nostalgia, memory and family histories. A Holding Affair looks at girlhood as both personal experience and generational inheritance through reimagined family archives.

Lauren Hendricks
Photographer, jazz vocalist and educator Lauren Hendricks brings her experience as a performer into a photographic practice focused on identity, performance and South African jazz culture. Her portraits of women jazz musicians capture strength, softness, joy and self-expression on and off stage.

Martha Nontyatyambo Kubule
Cape Town-based photographer and filmmaker Martha Nontyatyambo Kubule works between documentary and fine art photography, drawing on memory, identity, spirituality, grief and healing. Her intimate visual narratives often reflect on family, faith, resilience and belonging.

Myra Brown
Myra Brown’s photography looks closely at intimate and public spaces, finding beauty and comfort in the everyday. Bureaucracy, from her Sanctuaries series, considers spaces of safety alongside the systems of control and restriction that shape the lives of women and people of colour.

Sanell Aggenbach
Cape Town-based artist Sanell Aggenbach works across painting, printmaking and sculpture, considering the intersection of history and private narratives. Her practice has long engaged with subverted feminine tropes and feminist themes.

Antonia Steyn
Cape Town-based photographer Antonia Steyn works across fine art, portraiture, fashion and editorial photography, bringing a cinematic sensibility and precise compositional approach to her images. Her collaboration with Aggenbach responds to the latter’s NeoNature series through analogue photography and abstraction.

Reem Aljeally
Sudanese visual artist and curator Reem Aljeally works across painting, installation and printmaking, considering space, memory, movement and self-image. Her recurring female figures, often accompanied by domestic objects, cats and plants, inhabit spaces that balance vulnerability with resilience and defiance.

Sera Holland
Painter and ceramicist Sera Holland is known for thick impasto paintings and textural works made from leftover oil paint and ceramics. Too Much or Not Enough embraces colour, emotion and excess while questioning the expectations placed on women to be neither too much nor too little.

Sharday Swanepoel
Kommetjie-based lens artist Sharday Swanepoel draws on her background in architectural studies and her experience as a mother to consider childhood memory, domestic life and maternal identity. Her images bring the familiar into surreal territory, finding tenderness and imagination in everyday experience.

Sundus Saad
Cape Town-based South African-Arab fibre artist Sundus Saad works primarily with on- and off-loom weaving. Using varied textures and colours, her intuitive practice considers relationships, interconnectedness and the restorative possibilities of making.

Zimkhitha Mabonga
A fourth-year Fine Art student at Michaelis, Zimkhitha Mabonga works with materials including soil, archival imagery, transfer prints and ibomvu to consider land, memory, ancestry and resistance to erasure. Vosloorus || uses photographs of women in her family to honour the ordinary moments in which femininity is lived, shared and remembered.

Pretty Serious is on view throughout August as part of Women’s Month.