10 October 2026 · Reporting checked against the sources listed below.
Some materials arrive with histories already attached. In Catching, a two-person exhibition at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town, Chuma Adam and Siyabonga Fani use those histories as part of the work rather than treating canvas and clay as neutral surfaces.
The show opened on 1 October 2026 and runs until 24 October. It places Adam’s abstract paintings alongside Fani’s hand-built ceramic vessels, connecting two different approaches to making through questions of selfhood, nature, memory and transformation. The title suggests a moment when a material, an idea or a feeling begins to take hold.
Adam, a Johannesburg-based artist born in 2001, works with acrylic paint on umbhaco cotton, a fabric associated with Xhosa ceremonial dress. The support is not a conventional blank canvas. It has a cultural life outside the gallery, and the repeated gestures of her brushwork give the paintings a physical record of time and labour.
Fani, born in Gugulethu in 1981, works with recycled terracotta clay. He builds vessels by hand and uses smoke firing to produce dark, lustrous surfaces and markings that suggest weather, earth and the body. His practice is connected to a family history of making and to years of experimentation with ceramics.
One of the works shown, Fani’s umlambo (2026), has an elongated vessel form and a surface shaped by the firing process. The work does not need to illustrate a landscape to evoke one. Its marks are traces of a real material undergoing change.
The pairing creates a conversation across mediums. Adam’s surface gathers gestures on cloth; Fani’s object holds the effects of fire on clay. Both invite viewers to pay attention to the labour that makes an object and the histories that travel with its material.
Artsy included the exhibition in its 6 October selection of notable small-gallery shows, a reminder that independent spaces can put ambitious material practices in front of new audiences. Catching is on view at 99 Loop Street, Cape Town, until Saturday, 24 October. The gallery’s current programme is the best place to check visiting details.
