Sections and Curators: Introducing the Curated Sections at Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026

 

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026 is composed of four curated sections (Tomorrows/Today, SOLO, Generations and Cabinet/Record) in addition to three core sections (Main, Lookout and Editions), as well as our debut special project, Performance.

 

We are proud to introduce the four curators behind each of these curated sections: Dr Mariella Franzoni (Tomorrows/Today), Céline Seror (SOLO), Tandazani Dhlakama (Generations), and Beata America (Cabinet/Record), who are based in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Cape Town, respectively. Our 13th edition’s curatorial concept, Listen, guides each curator.

 

 

 

Barcelona-based Mariella Franzoni returns to curate the Tomorrows/Today section for her fourth year. Mariella is a curator, researcher and cultural manager specialising in contemporary art. Born in Sardinia, Mariella holds an academic background in Social Anthropology (Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna), Cultural Economics (Bocconi University, Milan) and Art Theory and Philosophy (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona). She earned her PhD in Humanities from Pompeu Fabra University and the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town), with a dissertation titled ‘The Economy of the Curatorial and the Fields of the Contemporary Art World’ (2019), which explores the intersections between curatorship, the art market and value formation in contemporary art from a critical and global perspective, with a particular focus on post-apartheid South Africa.

 

Over the past fifteen years, she has worked as an independent professional across Spain, Italy and South Africa, combining research, curating and cultural management. Her extensive experience includes roles as curator, artistic and executive director, project coordinator, and university lecturer. She regularly shares her knowledge through talks, panels and workshops, and complements her curatorial practice with strong engagement in cultural management, building connections between artists, institutions, galleries and collectors, and fostering meaningful synergies within the contemporary art ecosystem.

 

Throughout her career, she has collaborated with leading institutions such as Museum and Foundation (MACBA), Loop Festival, and Barcelona Gallery Weekend in Barcelona, the Centre Pompidou and Kandinsky Library in Paris, the Centre of Art and Nature (CDAN) in Huesca, Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), LagosPhoto Festival, and the African Art in Venice Forum (Venice Biennale).

 

In addition to her returning to her role as guest curator for Tomorrows/Today 2026, Mariella serves as Artistic and Executive Director of the fifth and sixth editions of By Invitation, the art salon of the Círculo Ecuestre de Barcelona, where she has led a major curatorial shift, placing intergenerational dialogue and the visibility of female voices from the Spanish art scene at the centre of the project.

 

 

 

Tomorrows/Today is a section dedicated to emerging and underrepresented artists, offering a platform for new perspectives and critical engagement. Additionally, the Tomorrows/Today prize is awarded by a panel of art professionals to the artist with the highest quality presentation.

 

 

 

The section highlights artists and galleries who speak from the complexity of their contexts and sensibilities, and who are willing to engage with the idea of dwelling in the in-between: between the visible and the invisible, myth and memory, history and speculation, the material and the spiritual, clarity and ambiguity, or joy and dissonance. It is in these threshold spaces that true listening can happen: as a gesture of care toward others and oneself, as the capacity to shift perception, as a mode of attention to inner and outer voices, to silences, to signs and thoughts that lie just beyond easy reach, too often obscured by the noise of urgency and expectation.

 

For its 2026 edition, the section is curated under the title If You Listen Carefully, The Air is Full of Laughter. The concept emerges from a pulse that runs through one of Ben Okri’s most luminous novels, ‘The Famished Road’ (1991), which tells the story of Azaro, a spirit-child ('Abiku' in Yoruba cosmology) who lives between the spiritual and earthly realms and chooses to remain in the world of the living with his beloved mother and father, despite his spirit companions’ attempts to lure him back to the spirit world. Azaro embodies a mode of listening to voices and sounds unheard by most humans, one that touches the material and the spiritual at once, while navigating a world fractured by inequality, violence and broken promises, grappling with the realities of post-colonial transition.

 

A novel that blends myth, political allegory and magical realism into a powerful reflection on survival, presence and sensing, it inspires us to wonder… How can we stay awake and listen in a world that is at once so unstable and violent, so haunted by history and the threat of future disasters, and yet so charged with beauty, desire and possibilities?

 

 

 

Céline Seror was born in Paris and is now based in Amsterdam as an independent consultant and curator. She returns for her second consecutive year to curate the SOLO section. In 2013, she co-founded the art agency 'artness', advocating a transcultural vision of contemporary art. That same year, she worked on the conception and launch of IAM – Intense Art Magazine, the first publication dedicated to women in art from Africa. In 2018, she co-created the print and digital platform 'The Art Momentum'.

 

For over a decade, she has been dedicated to spotlighting new voices and narratives through various publications and artistic projects. Between 2021 and 2024, she has served as co-curator of the travelling exhibition ‘Memoria: accounts of another History’, which was showcased in 2021 at the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA in Bordeaux, in 2022 at the Adama Toungara Museum of Contemporary Cultures in Abidjan, in 2023 at the National Museum of Cameroon in Yaounde, and in 2024 at the Fondation H in Antananarivo. In 2025, she curated Investec Cape Town Art Fair’s SOLO section titled Playscapes: Shaping Worlds and Selves.

 

 

 

SOLO offers in-depth, curated presentations of individual artists, both local and international, providing insight into the scope and evolution of their practice. This year, SOLO presents Echoes of Humanity, gathering artists who understand listening as an active, relational practice.

 

 

 

As instability deepens across the world, socially, politically and ecologically, listening emerges as a radical and necessary act. To listen is to extend care beyond ourselves, to bridge distances often filled with silence, fear and misunderstanding. It is a way of resisting the need to dominate; instead, we pause, we attune, we create space. It becomes a foundation for justice and a seed for transformation.

 

When we truly listen, we receive echoes, not mere repetitions, but resonances shaped by time, memory and relation. An echo is a voice returned to us, altered by the landscape it travels through. It carries the presence of another: human or more-than-human, living or remembered, near or far. In this way, echoes become part of what listening makes possible, a way for meaning to reverberate, to resurface, to renew. Each echo reminds us that we are not alone.

 

Through sound, image, memory and gesture, the works of the selected artists invite us to dwell in the in-between, where perception shifts and new forms of connection emerge, and to be with, not apart from, the world. In these troubled times, attending to voices, and the echoes they leave behind, long unheard, carried by people, winds, waters and the living earth, is not optional. It is our only way forward.

 

 

 

Zimbabwean-born Tandazani Dhlakama is the Curator of Global Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), where she is based in Toronto. Previously, she was curator at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, where she spearheaded the launch and development of the Zeitz MOCAA and University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellowship Programme in 2021. At Zeitz MOCAA she curated ‘Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers’ (2023) alongside Beata America, co-curated the travelling exhibition ‘When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting’ (2022) with the late Koyo Kouoh, co-curated ‘Shooting Down Babylon: A Tracey Rose Retrospective’ (2022), and curated ‘Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era’ (2018) amongst others. Her writing and editorial contributions have led to the formulation of the publications that accompanied these exhibitions.

 

Tandazani’s work with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, Tsoko Gallery in Harare, El Espacio 23 in Miami, and the 13th Recontres de Bamako/African Biennale of Photography in Bamako contributed to her co-curating 'Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono—On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming and Heritage’ (2022), curating ‘Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’ (2020), ‘Beyond the Body’ (2016), ‘ZimbabweIN Design’ (2014 and 2017) and ‘Dis(colour)ed Margins’ (2017) among others. Tandazani’s writing appears in the artist monographs of Akinbode Akinbiyi, Sungi Mlengeya, Georgina Maxim and Wallen Mapondera, in publications such as ‘Audacious Art Practices: Situating the Contemporary Arts of Africa’, ‘Aware Women Artists’, ‘Plasticity of the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Art and Its Institutions’ and in MOMA’s ‘Post: Notes on Art In A Global Context’, TSA Collector’s Series: ‘Artists & Cities’, Africanah: ‘Arena for Contemporary African, African American and Caribbean Art’, ArtLife Magazine and others.

 

Tandazani is a Beit Scholar and holds an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Leeds, UK (2015) and a BA in Fine Art and Political Science from St. Lawrence University, USA (2011). She serves as a member of the NESR Foundation Artistic Committee in Luanda.

 

 

 

Generations fosters intergenerational dialogue by pairing two artists at different stages in their careers, illuminating shared concerns and aesthetic contrasts. Under Tandazani Dhlakama’s curation, the section is named Call and Response.

 

 

 

Call and Response highlights how artists from various times and spaces have explored similar topics or have used related processes to speak about similar concerns. Call and Response calls for generative ways of disrupting uncomfortable silences. As a process, call-and-response requires active listening in order for one to know when and how to engage. Musically and poetically, Call and Response is a melodic structure that is common in countless African sonic traditions. Internationally, it has inspired many forms of music, old to contemporary, from Southern African gospel hymns to American jazz and West African Afrobeat.

 

This section includes distinct individual voices from around the world, gestures towards artistic lineages connected to key moments in African histories, yet points to how nuanced practices have contributed to larger conversations.

 

In call-and-response sonic compositions, usually one leads, projects their voice, or starts a tune for the others. However, there is no hierarchical structure as the role of the lead is only to stir or trigger reaction. The respondents can decide on how to add their own tone, pitch or harmony which enriches the response. Similarly, this section examines intergenerational commonalities and showcases how artists are citing each other or continuing important narratives in new and interesting ways. Call and Response encourages, and at times even insists on, the participation of all those who can hear. It aims to foster conversation over confrontation, and dialogue over dispute by reflecting on the past and making meaning of the present.

 

 

 

Born and based in Cape Town, Beata America holds a Diploma in Classical Music from Stellenbosch University (2012 - 2015), a BA Humanities Degree from Stellenbosch University (2016 - 2018), as well as an Honours in Curatorship through the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art (2019).

 

In 2021, she joined the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town, and is the museum’s Assistant Curator as of 2024. During her time at the museum, she has worked on several exhibitions, most recently ‘Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers’ (2023), a group exhibition co-curated with Tandazani Dhlakama, ‘The Other Side of Now’ (2024), a solo exhibition of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, and ‘One Must Be Seated’ (2024), a solo exhibition of Rita Mawuena Benissan.

 

In 2020, Beata broadened her curatorial practice and co-founded the art wine collective 'Processus' with partner Megan van der Merwe. 'Processus' is a curator and winemaker collaboration which explores wine as an ephemeral art object and the artistic processes therein, with a particular focus on minority grape varieties in South Africa.

 

 

 

Each year, Cabinet/ highlights a different medium which aligns with its guest curator’s vision. For this next iteration, the section operates as Cabinet/Record, where galleries can propose a single work to showcase photographs that capture impressions of the world around us.

 

 

 

Cabinet/Record intends to offer shapeshifting perspectives which resonate and remind us of an idea, time or feeling. Often regarded as a protected space of display, it can be seen as a device which holds scenes of significant memory, carefully chosen and safely encased in nostalgia and preciousness. Through this understanding, we can see photography as an apt medium to display this act of preservation and expression. A means to look deeper beyond the façade of the photograph and to induce active listening to the moments that linger outside of the frame.

 

Cabinet/Record broadens our understanding and relationship to the visual components of sound, through the expression and listening of photographs as record-keeping devices. In reference to Tina Campt’s text 'Listening to Images', “Sound can be listened to, and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people”. [1]

 

Looking at this within the broader theme of Listen, we could imagine sound as more than an auditory response but rather an idiomatic expression. Perhaps it sounds like a story you heard before, or a recollection from when you were young. It could be a perception, conclusion or preference. A descriptor of how something seems to be, which evokes a feeling or memory. The sound of music, freedom, resistance, fortitude, and light. Or just possibly, the sound of a good or bad idea. Sound could also be understood as the absence of auditory frequencies, the sound of silence. An acknowledgement that even in quiet moments there is something to be heard. “Quiet is a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and affect which creates the possibility for it to register as meaningful”. [2]

 

The photographs in this section acknowledge the power of this desire to enhance, express and amplify. They are more than snapshots and additions to vacant shelves, but expressive embellishments that utter the sound of life.

 

[1] Campt, 'Listening to Images', 6.

[2] Campt, 'Ibid', 4.

 

 

For more information on the application procedures, please get in touch with Mia Louw at mia@fieramilano.co.za

 

For any communications and press queries, please get in touch with Jess Wright at jess@fieramilano.co.za