Exhibition Type: Group Exhibition
Artists: Ala Kheir, Alida Rodrigues, Amilton Neves Cuna, Godelive Kasangati Kabena, Ibrahim Ahmed, Lorraine Kalassa, Maheder Haileselassie, Michelle Loukidis, Nii Obodai, Nobukho Nqaba, Nonzuzo Gxekwa, Pippa Hetherington and Tshepiso Moropa
Venue: Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation
Address: The Old Granary Building, Buitenkant St, District Six, Cape Town
Opening: 03 September 2026, 18:00
Exhibition End Date: 30 September 2026
Description:
The Photographic Collective (TPC), in partnership with the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, will
present I Witnessed This, a group exhibition of thirteen photographic artists from across Africa and its
diasporas.
I Witnessed This is presented as part of the Cape Town Photography Festival 2026, whose theme this
year is TRUTH. Photography has long been trusted as evidence; today, images are easily manipulated,
re-contextualised, and weaponised. Under the theme of TRUTH, the festival examines photography’s
role in shaping belief, memory, and power, not as a search for certainty, but as an inquiry into how
truths are produced, challenged, and resisted. I Witnessed This takes up that inquiry directly, asking not
what a photograph proves, but what truth it carries, and from what position.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the Foundation’s long-held conviction that truth is not merely a
fact to be stated but a power to be exercised, and that speaking truth to power is an act of courage,
witness and resistance.
Curated by Pippa Hetherington, a member of The Photographic Collective, the exhibition brings together
portraiture, collage, fabricated imagery and archival work by artists whose practices span Sudan, Angola,
Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa. Rather than
treating photography as evidence of what happened, the exhibition asks a harder question: what truth
does a given work carry, from what position is the artist witnessing, and what has it meant to make that
visible?
“To witness is not simply to document,” says curator Pippa Hetherington. “It is to be present, to be
implicated, and to carry responsibility for what you have seen and how you choose to show it. What
binds these thirteen artists is not a shared aesthetic but a shared ethical position: that representation is
never neutral, and that bearing witness carries an obligation to the subject, to history, and to the
viewer.”
“I Witnessed This speaks directly to the Foundation’s own commitments,” says Nazli Abrahams, Head of
Programmes at the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. “Its artists understand, as Archbishop
Tutu did, that truth is not merely a fact to be stated but a power to be exercised. We are proud to host
this work, and to add our voice to its call: that bearing witness is an act of courage.”
Featured artists are Ala Kheir, Alida Rodrigues, Amilton Neves Cuna, Godelive Kasangati Kabena, Ibrahim
Ahmed, Lorraine Kalassa, Maheder Haileselassie, Michelle Loukidis, Nii Obodai, Nobukho Nqaba,
Nonzuzo Gxekwa, Pippa Hetherington and Tshepiso Moropa.
