Date: 19 September 2026, (10:00 -17:00)
Presenters: Nicky Newman
Address: Fairweather House, 31 Francis Street, corner Nelson Street, Woodstock
Date: 19 September 2026, (10:00 -17:00)
Presenter: Nicky Newman
Address: Fairweather House, 31 Francis Street (corner Nelson St), Woodstock
Following the success of last year’s event, photographer Nicky Newman once again opens her studio to the public for a special one-day Open Studio. Featuring historical works from her archive, photographs from her acclaimed series A Place of Water, and a programme of digital slide presentations, the event offers a rare opportunity to step inside the artist’s creative workspace and experience the engine room of her photographic practice.
Description:
My name is Marguerite, and more than 25 years ago I received a heart transplant in Cape Town. On 16 July 2000, at just 17 years old, I was given a second life under the care of Dr Susan Vosloo, Africa’s first female heart surgeon. This body of work is expressed through both portraiture and still life, and is a meditation on survival, gratitude, and becoming – told through my lens as both photographer and subject.
Truth, for me, is not abstract. It is something I carry within my body. To live with another woman’s heart is both a medical reality and something that feels, even now, beyond logic – an inexplicable intervention. This is my truth: not something I can escape, only something I can learn to honour.
This series reflects what it means to live after being given life. It speaks to the fragile threshold between loss and continuation, and to the unseen bond between two women who never met, yet share one beating heart.
Our Heart was photographed at the site of the accident where my donor lost her life. An ostrich collided with the vehicle, and the injuries she sustained were fatal days later. From that moment of tragedy, life was transferred – hers becoming mine.
In these portraits, I embody Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, holding an ostrich egg as a symbol of the Cosmic Egg. In myth, the Cosmic Egg represents creation itself – the origin of the universe, the beginning of time, spirit, and form. It speaks to rebirth not as illusion, but as transformation. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, a French Visitation nun, received visions of Christ in which His Sacred Heart was revealed as a symbol of divine love and mercy. Through her, devotion to the Sacred Heart took form – a theology rooted in the heart as both vessel and offering.
Within this expanded series, works titled Sacrifice and Weighing Souls deepen this inquiry. Sacrifice reflects the silent exchange that made my life possible – the unchosen offering where one life yields to another. Weighing Souls draws from ancient Egyptian belief, where the heart was weighed against a feather to determine the soul’s passage into the afterlife. Here, the heart is no longer symbolic – it is real, carried, and questioned. What is the weight of a life lived with another’s heart? What does truth ask of us in return?
This series is both elegy and offering. It honours the woman whose heart lives within me, the surgeon whose hands placed it there, and the mystery that binds death and life together. It is my quiet thank-you, and my Sacred Heart.
Opening: 04 September 2026, 18:00
Exhibition Type: Solo Exhibition
Artist: Sean Wilson
Venue: BIJOU PROJECT SPACE
Opening: 04 September 2026, 18:00Address: 178 Lower Main Road, Observatory
This body of work comprises four sets of twelve photographs of perhaps Africa’s most photographed natural wonder: Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
The first set consists of commercially produced tourist photographs from the 1950s, found in an envelope amongst my maternal Grandmother’s possessions. The second set are photographs made by myself in June 2024 whilst on a journey to introduce my son to the land of my mother’s birth. Faced with the futile task of photographing the Falls themselves, I instead found myself photographing representations of the Falls in the town of Victoria Falls. The third set are water-damaged transparencies taken by my paternal grandfather on a family holiday in 1969. The final set features photographs made by colonial-era photographers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Each set reframes the Falls in different ways — from the constructed gaze of the tourist industry, to the familial, the contemporary and reflexive, to the historical and colonial. This temporal and stylistic diversity nudges the viewer to move beyond the clichés that so often govern our visual encounters of the world. By juxtaposing four similar views of the Falls from different eras, I hope to disrupt the tyranny of any singular way of looking at the world and bring into question photography’s stubborn – albeit tenuous – claims towards truth. Ultimately, this project explores how photography both expands and limits our ways of seeing.
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Description:
The Four Kings is a photographic project documenting a single oak tree with four trunks in Kongeeikene. Estimated to be between 500 and 600 years old, the tree was photographed over the course of a year.
Now at the height of its life, it may, under favourable conditions, endure for centuries more, yet it already bears visible signs of wear. The causes remain uncertain, but this project does not seek a scientific explanation. Instead, it takes the tree as a visual and existential point of departure.
“For many years, I have regarded this tree as an extraordinary natural presence. Since 2018, I have consciously turned to subjects that I believe carry significance for the future – forms that embody beauty, vulnerability, and complexity.”The Four Kings is both a tribute and a quiet warning. It documents the tree as an artwork in itself, while also suggesting a longer temporal arc in which it may come to reflect our own relationship to – and destruction of – the natural world. The tree remains still as its surroundings shift. In this, it becomes both witness and mirror.
Festival Director:
Heidi Erdmann info@capetownphotofest.co.za
Festival Coordinator:
Alexandra Martinez
Marketing:
Gina Ten Zeldam Ganswyk: gina@purplepine.co.za
Web Design:
EIE Productions: dylan@eieproductions.net
