Under the Aegis – the independent Cape Town gallery founded by curator Anelisa Mangcu, opens As Tides Change, a group exhibition that feels less like a showcase of artworks and more like a collective exhale. It is an exhibition that asks its audience to slow down. To look again. To remember.

Mangcu has always placed meaning in the quiet gestures of making the stitch, the dye, the repeated line, and As Tides Change extends that thinking into a broader conversation about transformation and the elastic nature of African identity. The exhibition brings together seven artists; Aaron Philander, Bubu Ogisi, Kimathi Mafafo, Lwando Dlamini, Sitaara Stodel, Tusevo Landu, and Vida Pamela Madighi-Oghu – whose practices each touch, in their own way, on movement, materiality, and the soft labour of becoming.

What emerges is a layered meditation on change. Not the dramatic kind that splits one reality from another, but the incremental shifts, the familiar rhythms that accumulate over time. The works in the exhibition lean into this idea of return rather than rupture: a cycle of remembering, reworking, and reimagining that runs through many African creative traditions.

Mangcu describes this fluidity as central to the curatorial vision. “Transformation is not always loud,” she reflects. “Often it is a return to something we already know. These works carry memory, in fabric, in thread, in found matter, in ways that remind us that making is a vessel of knowledge.”

This philosophy has anchored Under the Aegis since its founding in 2020. In just a few years, the gallery has become one of Cape Town’s most compelling voices in contemporary art, known both for its focus on emerging African talent and for Mangcu’s commitment to mentorship and access. As one of the few Black women to independently own and lead a gallery in the city, she has carved out a space that challenges received narratives about who gets to shape and redefine contemporary African art.

As Tides Change is a continuation of that work. The exhibition positions African ways of knowing as central, not peripheral, to global conversations about art. It invites viewers to move slowly, to spend time with colour, texture, and material, and to consider the knowledge that lives within these acts of making.

There is a sense, walking through the gallery, of witnessing a tide in motion: not a single wave, but a constellation of movements shaping and reshaping the shoreline. The artists gathered here share a commitment to process, to memory, and to the idea that art can be both an archive and an opening.

For Mangcu, that is the heart of the exhibition. “Under the Aegis is about shifting the lens,” she says. “African artists are not joining the conversation they have always been leading it.”

As Tides Change offers a space where that leadership is quiet, steady, and unmistakably present.

Exhibition Info

As Tides Change
Under the Aegis Gallery
17 Jamieson St, Gardens, Cape Town
4 October – 4 December 2025