Sibusiso Bheka is a documentary photographer whose work reflects the violent past of South Africa while celebrating the beauty present in township life. On the occasion of this talk, he will engage in a conversation with Sandrine Colard about his artistic practice and his involvement in Of Soul and Joy, a mentorship program dedicated to social and artistic photography, based in the Thokoza township in Johannesburg.
Exhibition open from 5:30 PM
Conversation: 6:30 – 7:30 PM
Pay what you can (€ 2 – 5 – 8 – 12)
In English
Sibusiso Bheka (b. 1997, Thokoza, South Africa) graduated from Vaal University of Technology and discovered photography in 2012 through the Of Soul and Joy (mentoring programme for social and artistic photography developed by Rubis Mécénat), for which he works now as Project Assistant.
His series Stop Nonsense was shown at the 2017 Rencontres de Bamako and later in the Netherlands. Bheka has exhibited internationally, including at Croisière (Arles, France, 2020), Bristol Photo Festival (Bristol, UK, 2021) and PhotoSaintGermain (Paris, France, 2024) and has been shortlisted for awards like the Magnum Foundation Fellowship. He recently completed a residency in Lisbon, with a solo show and catalogue forthcoming, and will have a solo exhibition at the upcoming Paris Photo Fair.
Sandrine Colard is a curator at the Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels (Belgium). A specialist in African art and photography, her recent writings have appeared in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2024), A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography (Tate, 2023), and Style Congo: Heritage and Heresy (CIVA, 2023). She curated the exhibitions Recaptioning Congo (FOMU, 2022), Congoville (Middelheim Museum, 2021), The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture (The Image Centre, Canada, 2019), and the 6th edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale (DRC, 2019). Her book on the history of photography in colonial Congo (1885–1960) will be published by Duke University Press in the fall of 2026.
