With just a few days to go before Thato Toeba’s FNB Art Joburg solo exhibition opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), the practical and emotional work of preparing for it has become difficult to separate. There is the making and moving of things, thinking about scale and how people will move through the space. But there is also the building itself.
“JAG is such a particular building. It has this monumental quality, and I think that has made me think differently about what an exhibition can be,” says Toeba. “The architecture has its own history, its own authority, its own ghosts.”
The exhibition marks the next chapter following Toeba’s 2025 FNB Art Prize win, which included the opportunity to develop a solo exhibition at JAG. A year ago, the prize recognised a practice already beginning to move beyond collage and the archive. Now, JAG has provided the scale to explore where that instinct might lead.
“There is a point where you have to stop imagining the exhibition and actually let it become something,” Toeba says. “That is probably the hardest part.”
From making worlds to questioning them
As children, Toeba and their twin cut pictures from magazines to create worlds in exercise books. Years later, collage became part of a practice interrogating history, memory and power.
Their background in law also shaped an interest in how systems can claim objectivity and establish authority. Art offered another way of questioning those ideas.
“I could take an image, cut it apart, put it next to something else and suddenly the authority of the original image became unstable,” Toeba says. “I am interested in how realities are constructed, who constructs them, and what happens when you start moving the pieces around.”
By the time Toeba won the Art Prize, collage and archives were giving way to another question: what if the space surrounding the artwork could become part of the work itself? The winning body of work brought previously separate strands of their practice together.
“There was the archive, there was photography, there was collage, there was history and politics, but there was also play,” they say. “I think it represented a moment of clarity.”
Mandla Sibeko, Managing Director of FNB Art Joburg, describes Toeba’s practice as “careful, considered, and honest about complexity”, when “there is so much at stake in how stories are told and who gets to tell them.”
What becomes possible after recognition
A year later, the significance of the prize can be seen in what Toeba has been able to make because of it. “There is something very generous about being told, essentially, you have this opportunity, now make something,” Toeba says. “It creates a different kind of pressure, but also a different kind of freedom.”
Developing the exhibition has required new thinking about installation, architecture and how viewers move through space. For FNB, that progression is central to the Art Prize.
“The real measure of any art platform is not the moment of recognition itself, but what that recognition unlocks,” says Linda Kachingwe-Sisya, Chief Marketing Officer at FNB. “Our ambition with the FNB Art Prize has always been to create opportunities that extend beyond the award, empowering artists to grow their craft, explore new creative frontiers and strengthen their presence in the contemporary art landscape. Thato’s journey to this solo exhibition is a compelling example of that vision in action, demonstrating how sustained support can help transform potential into lasting artistic impact.”
When the building participates
Perhaps the greatest surprise for Toeba has been discovering how much JAG itself participates in the work.
“I had this idea that I would make the work and then install it in JAG,” they say. “But the more time I spent there, the more ridiculous that idea seemed. The building is too present.”
Beyond its walls is Johannesburg, a city Toeba describes through movement, migration, extraction, aspiration, violence, reinvention. “The exhibition has become less about putting objects into a room and more about figuring out what happens when the work, the building and the city start speaking to each other.”
The shift connects with Toeba’s interest in how history remains present in cities, movement and whose stories become accepted knowledge.
“These things are historical, but they are also completely present,” Toeba says. “An artist can have a very ambitious idea and still not have the material conditions to make it,” they say. “So when an institution says, here is a space, here is some support, take this seriously and make the work, that can change the trajectory of a practice.”
Leaving something unresolved
Toeba doesn’t want to prescribe what visitors should take from the exhibition. “I would rather people encounter something and have a feeling that there is more to it than what they can immediately understand,” they say. “I hope they argue. Not necessarily with me, but with the work, with each other, maybe even with themselves.”
Toeba hopes to remember the JAG exhibition not as an arrival, but as a point when its possibilities became larger. “I would rather it be the exhibition where I took a risk and opened something up,” they conclude. Because arriving at a final answer isn’t the ambition. “I want it to keep making problems for me.”
Thato Toeba’s FNB Art Joburg solo exhibition opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on Sunday 6 September 2026.
Apiwe Mjambane
Soweto Sunrise News
