Cape Town’s 99 Loop Gallery recently presented the debut solo exhibition of Cape Town Creative Academy Contemporary Art Honours alumnus Mhlonishwa Zulu / @_someguysart , titled Where do I sit and where am I seated? (27 September to 25 October 2025).
Mhlo exhibited a compelling body of his honours work as well as new paintings that extend his interest in narrative, symbolism and the strange, in-between spaces of everyday life.
A practice built from stories
Mhlo’s work grows out of storytelling: the childhood cadence of family tales, the moral puzzles of religious symbolism, and the improvisation of daily experience. Rather than illustrating a single plot, his canvases stage encounters between the sacred and the ordinary, the remembered and the imagined, so that viewers are nudged into reading pictures like parables. The result is not didactic; it is conversational. Dialogue, both in the studio and with audiences, sits at the core of his method, with conversation treated as collaboration, a way to braid perspectives and surface new meanings.
Liminal rooms, porous landscapes
Mhlo sets familiar interiors against dreamlike exteriors, letting thresholds blur. Windows open onto atmospheres that feel both near and unreachable; furniture becomes a character; motifs function as signposts rather than props. Colour does important emotional work here. Cool and warm tones drift across surfaces, slowing us down as compositions toggle between stasis and event. That oscillation, which holds action, inaction and the spaces between, is part of the point. The paintings hold still long enough for the mind to move.
The language of signs and being “seated” and unseated
Zulu’s ongoing research explores the power of signs, their cultural freight, their historical echoes, and the frictions that arise when we reuse them. He notes how light, signage, and spatial rhythms shape perception in Cape Town’s layered urban and coastal landscapes. In the studio, these observations become a visual lexicon: fruit, vessels, thresholds, veils and celestial weather. Titles intensify the sense that each work is a riddle worth sitting with.
His paintings use storms or clear skies as symbols of faith, grief and determination. Together, the works return to the show’s central question, offering views from the home, the chapel and dreamlike spaces.
He uses surrealist strategies such as dislocation, juxtaposition and shifts in scale to open reflective space. In that space, familiar objects behave like symbols, and symbols behave like people, complicated and sometimes contradictory, always in conversation with context.
CTCA to 99 Loop
For CTCA students and alumni, Mhlo’s exhibition is a clear example of practice-led research. It shows how close observation can turn into strong ideas, how theory can guide practical choices in the studio, and how an artist’s voice can be both confident and open to new influences. It also shows steady professional growth: from honours studies to a first solo show, built on regular studio work, ongoing conversations with peers, and clear curatorial support.
