Exhibitions — Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture

The Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture regularly host exhibitions, either in the Centre’s Project Space or making use of NIROX’s exhibition spaces. These exhibitions are intended to advance the study of art and sculpture. They are often hosted in collaboration with tertiary institutions and universities and accompanied by workshops that enable students and the general public insights into an artist or group of artists working processes. At times, the exhibitions may showcase work produced by an artist in residence, or the many works produced by a group of artists developed over the course of a workshop. These workshops are often geared towards the exchange of knowledge, where artists share skills, techniques, or approaches to working with particular materials. Teachers and lecturers are invited to reach out to the Centre to facilitate walkabouts, workshops, and talks related to our exhibitions programme.

CURRENT

Jeremy and Colleen Wafer: Clouding Over

South African artist Jeremy Wafer, along with his wife and long-time collaborator Colleen, were in residence at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture at NIROX between March and April 2026, where they produced a new body of work. This exhibition continues Wafer's decades-long engagement with questions of dislocation, memory and materiality, extending work initiated during their previous residency at NIROX in 2023.

Working across sculpture, photography, film, and drawing, Wafer's practice explores the politics and poetics of place, engaging with land and territory, and the complex histories of location, dispossession and restitution that shape South Africa's social and political landscape.

In Clouding Over, these concerns are approached through an open engagement with materials and processes that foreground change and mutability. Developed through a sustained period of studio work, the exhibition reflects a shift towards more intuitive connections between material form and psychological states. The works carry a restrained, sombre tone, responding to broader conditions of uncertainty and instability.

The exhibition brings together a series of materially-driven works that remain open in their interpretation. Elements such as cement-soaked blankets and fields of gold emergency sheeting evoke fragility and temporality, while inviting viewers to form their own readings. An earlier video work, Clouding Over, is included as a title piece, extending the exhibition's engagement with atmospheres of quiet disquiet.

Clouding Over forms part of the broader Soil & Water project, curated by Basak Senova (University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Johan Thom (University of Pretoria).