Brundyn+ presents PLAKKERS, a group exhibition by artists and collectives working in and around the genre of street art in Cape Town. The exhibition brings into conversation some of the many voices of visual dissent taking place in the city.

“The wall” is a common motif in these artists’ works, either as the site where the work is placed or as the very content of the work itself. As a versatile Afrikaans word meaning either stickers, decorators, squatters or pesters, PLAKKERS echoes this motif but also places the show within the vernacular register of everyday Cape Town news headlines where “land is invaded” and “squatters evicted”.

Central to the exhibition is the work of three city-based collectives who have appropriated the visual language of graffiti in order to comment on historic and contemporary events often forgotten in the public imaginary. Tokolos Stencils, Xcollektiv and The Burning Museum use the mediums of wheatpaste, stickers, stencil and spray paint to redecorate the city with their own agendas, touching on issues such as the Marikana massacre, gentrification in Woodstock and broader issues of forced removals and land redistribution.

The concerns of individual artists are also represented. Khaya Witbooi’s hyper realistic afro-pop paintings simulating the graffiti and stickers on city walls coalesce with frames from Ashley Walters’ photographic essays on the walls of the Cape flats taken in the Nooitgedacht and Uitsig neighbourhoods. Chad Rossouw presents an installation, which is an ode to the vibracrete walls of the suburb of Tableview while Atang Tshikare’s architectural drawings give us a glimpse onto the structure of walls in a future Cape Town. Bringing the subject closer to home, Haroon Gunn- Salie’s shards of broken stained glass, speak to the fracturing of the Bo-Kaap area of Cape Town, the quarter in which the gallery is situated.

Brundyn+ will conduct a walkabout of PLAKKERS to be announced at a later date.

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