Oupa Sibeko, Dog Hotel, 2025, pastel and oil stick on canvas, 69 1⁄4 × 54".
Oupa Sibeko’s exhibition “Theme Park” presented play as a performative gesture and as material. The artist summarized his method as a striving “to play seriously”—a prayer or living mantra that he traces back to his grandmother, Ouma Sibeko, who named him and raised him until the age of ten. He served as her caretaker after she suffered a stroke and lost her speech. In what became a transformative moment, Ouma (her name, but also the South African term of endearment meaning “granny”) spoke her final words to him one morning: “Don’t forget to play.”
Sibeko’s oeuvre since graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2015 includes paintings, works on paper, video installations, and a performance practice. Beyond the tangible materials of oil pastels and canvas, but also bubble wrap and sandpaper, he works with the intangible and spiritual material of play. Many of the pieces in the show, among them Big Purple, 2024–25, Dog Hotel, 2025, and Pothole Report, 2025, were created directly on the streets of Zonnebloem and Gardens, two suburbs of Cape Town, during a residency at Lemkus Gallery, which is situated in the heart of the city’s central business district. On his daily walks between home and studio, Sibeko would use the streets as a surface upon which to explore his mark-making, laying unprimed canvas over potholes on the street to trace their textures and lift the physical imprints of urban surfaces—a form of frottage, a technique popularized by Surrealist Max Ernst, allowing ash, dirt, and burnt grass into the paintings. This direct incorporation of vestiges of place becomes significant when one considers the history of Zonnebloem, a part of the old District Six, from which Black and Coloured South Africans were forcibly removed in the 1960s. Part of the area remains uninhabited, with large swaths of underdeveloped land where the apartheid government failed to fulfill its plans of creating a whites-only district. The vibrancy of the old suburb was replaced by a still-unfinished terrain, open and haunted.
To counter the narrative of pain, or perhaps to acknowledge it obliquely, Sibeko decided to use vivid color as a form of resistance and as a gesture to challenge conventional approaches to historical trauma that often default to the dark and somber. The figures that emerge from his traces, faces, monsters, and dogs are what he identifies as the spirits of District Six. These forms represent what he refers to as “dancing spirits,” offering a different way of accessing memories of spatial injustice and the possibility of healing.
To extend the theme of play, Sibeko also created site-specific works that call for audience participation. These include pieces crafted from pastel and sandpaper, which viewers were encouraged to place in different configurations on a steel rack. By using sandpaper, the artist teases out the fluid boundary between work and play, gamifying the use of the material through the lens of discovery.
Sibeko’s investigation of play extends to its darker possibilities in Biting the Bullet I–V, 2025. Spending three weeks at a local shooting range, he observed how people engage with guns as a form of recreation. The social aspect intrigued him: The clubs that meet every Sunday, the celebrations, and the events centered on target practice. He used salvaged cardboard from these ranges, tracing them with figures in bright colors to problematize the assumption that play is inherently safe. The found cardboard targets are octagonal, which, for him, evoked psychological models of emotional complexity, tracing a line connecting recreational violence to real brutality and showing how activities of escape can transform into something more troubling. But overall, Sibeko’s work suggests that his grandmother had the right idea: Play is significant and spiritual.
