The Standard Bank Art Lab Presents Rumours /2026 by Santu Mofokeng
Johannesburg, South Africa,There is a way that memory circulates before it settles. It moves through people in fragments, in gestures, in images half-held and half-recalled. It gathers slowly, carried between voices, before it takes form. It is within this register that the Standard Bank Art Lab presents Rumours /2026 by Santu Mofokeng.
Rumours 2026, co-curated by Lunetta Bartz on behalf of the Santu Mofokeng Foundation, brings together three bodies of work drawn from Mofokeng’s extended engagement with Bloemhof and its surrounding communities between 1988 and 1994. First shown in 1994 as Rumours / The Bloemhof Portfolio, this exhibition returns not as a fixed historical moment, but as something reactivated, repositioned for a present that continues to negotiate the conditions it reflects.
The title gestures toward the ways in which knowledge moves: laterally, informally, and often without resolution. It reflects Mofokeng’s own method, one grounded in proximity, in trust, in the time required to see without imposing. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a field of relations shaped by memory, labour, intimacy, and belief.
At the centre of the exhibition is The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, a body of work composed of studio portraits collected by Mofokeng over many years. Commissioned by Black working and middle-class families, these images exist outside of official archives. They were made for interiors, for private circulation, for the spaces where life is held rather than displayed. In gathering, retouching, and re-presenting them, Mofokeng does not claim authorship. Instead, he reframes them, asking what it means to encounter images that were never intended for public view, and what it means to look within an archive that resists containment.
Alongside this, Concert at Sewefontein traces a moment of collective release. Photographed during a gathering of farmworkers and tenant labourers, the images move through low light and motion, bodies folding into one another, time loosening its edges. What appears is not documentation alone, but an atmosphere, a way of being together that exceeds the frame.
Labour Tenancies anchors the exhibition in the textures of everyday life. Produced during Mofokeng’s research with tenant farming communities, these photographs hold the contradictions of place: intimacy and distance, familiarity and estrangement. They resist simplification, insisting instead on the complexity of lives shaped within, but not reducible to, the structures of apartheid.
Across these works, Mofokeng’s practice unsettles the expectations of documentary photography. Rather than producing images of spectacle or crisis, he turns toward what is often overlooked: the spiritual, the domestic, the quietly constructed self. His photographs move between what is seen and what remains withheld, between presence and absence, evidence and projection.
“Rumours /2026 brings us into proximity with the ways images live beyond their making,” says Standard Bank Curator and Gallery Manager, Dr. Same Mdluli.
“In Santu Mofokeng’s work, we encounter photography not as a fixed record, but as a space of relation where memory, imagination and lived experience converge. What emerges is not a singular history, but a set of positions from which Black life has been seen, shaped, and self-articulated. This exhibition invites us to consider how images travel, what they carry and how they continue to return to us, asking to be read differently.”
Lunetta Bartz, co-founder of The Santu Mofokeng Foundation explains: “This exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of the formation of The Santu Mofokeng Foundation, offering the South African public the opportunity to appreciate a focused selection of some of his most significant work. “To me, the most compelling aspect in creating this exhibition was the opportunity to give equal weight to Mofokeng’s writing, which so critically informed his photographic process.”
Born in Johannesburg in 1956 and raised in Soweto, Santu Mofokeng developed a practice that consistently refused the limits placed on representation. From his early years as a street photographer, through his work with Afrapix, to his role as a researcher and artist, he remained attentive to the ways in which Black life was imaged, and mis-imaged, within South Africa. His work forms part of an ongoing counter-archive, one that restores agency, interiority, and complexity to its subjects. Rumours /2026 holds these histories not as resolved narratives, but as living material. It does not seek to fix meaning. Instead, it allows images to circulate, to falter, to return transformed over time.
Presented as part of the Standard Bank Art Lab’s commitment to engaging African artistic legacies as active frameworks, this exhibition situates Mofokeng’s work within a broader conversation about land, memory, and representation. It asks what it means to inherit images, and how those images continue to shape the present. Like something overheard and carried forward, Rumours /2026 does not arrive complete. It unfolds. It lingers. It asks us to remain with what cannot be fully resolved, and to look again, with care.
