Elementor #13901

Bag Factory is pleased to present When We Gather…the ordinary becomes extraordinary, a fundraising group exhibition featuring selected alumni & current artists from three and a half decades of studio practices, awards and project programming. This show continues on our year’s celebrations marking 35 years of creating space for and providing opportunities to artists, curators and writers at every stage of their careers.

The curatorial framework and title take its cues from several sources: The first is the acknowledgment that since its inception in 1991, the Bag Factory’s legacy stems from a place of care: a founding act of responsiveness — the recognition of a need, and the creation of a space and a format to meet it. A place where primarily young artists of colour coming from common lived experiences and creative circumstances, could work, could gather, and exchange ideas and skills. The second is the sentiment that is held as one of our core principles: that art is learned, shaped, and deepened in community. The studio — both at once an intensely personal space and a profoundly shared one — becomes the site where individual practice and collective presence meet. It is under this common roof that something particular has always emerged: a creative ecosystem sustained not by programmes alone, but by the accumulated presence of those who have passed through it and left something of themselves.

A remarkable cross-section of contemporary South African and International artists visible and revered both locally and abroad — spanning painting, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and interdisciplinary practice. The third is continuity — not as fixed legacy, but as something living: shifting, crossing over, and progressing. The fourth is perhaps the most intimate: every artist gathered here has spent time within Bag Factory’s walls. That shared inhabitation — across different years, different mediums and bodies of work, different moments in the institution’s unfolding life — is the quiet but enduring thread that binds this exhibition. Rooted in this context of “holding” that the exhibition’s title has borrowed part of its intention. It is a sentiment of complexity, its dignity, its depth that directly maps onto Bag Factory’s fabric – its couches, and chairs, its layered in paint walls, its shared lunches, and its studio rhythms as sites of profound and sometimes difficult encounters and creativity.

The exhibition is an act of honouring! Honouring what has been made here, what has been exchanged here, and what continues to reverberate within the structure itself.