Johannesburg-based artists Gabrielle Goliath and Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s are included in the 40th anniversary of MoMA’s New Photography series. Their work is on view alongside eleven other artists and collectives working across Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Highlighted as “one of the foremost platforms for contemporary photographic practices” by Peta Pixel’s Kate Garibaldi, this year’s edition titled “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging” explores the concept of belonging, community, remembrance and cross-generational knowledge sharing.
Holland Cotter’s New York Times review of the exhibition highlights how for these artists, photography is more than a flat image restricted to a page or screen. Works include installations, sculptures, and murals. This can be seen in Sobekwa’s iterative project “uMthimkhulu (The Big Tree)”. An installation made up of framed photographs, charcoal, pastel, mapped together on paper, the work exists as an autobiographical installation reminiscent of a family tree. The work refers to the ‘ihlathi lesiXhosa’, the shrubs and forests in the Eastern Cape that have a sacred significance for the amaXhosa people. The proliferating roots, branches and trunk represent how Sobekwa’s attempts to connect his life in Johannesburg with his ongoing journey to discover more about the lives of his family members and his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape. In the work, he makes visible for the viewer the way he uses symbolism to link images and family stories. This can be seen through hand-drawn lines, train tracks and the use of clan names and phrases that speak to familial roots as well as draws on the landscapes of both the Eastern Cape and the city of Johannesburg. A previous iteration of the work was presented centrally as part of “Umkhondo: Going Deeper”—his first solo exhibition at the historic Johannesburg Art Gallery, following his 2023 FNB Art Prize Award.
Goliath presents “Berenice 29–39”, an installation of eleven portraits of women of colour. Each portrait stands as a commemorative gesture to the artist’s late childhood friend, Berenice, reasserting tenderness and beauty in the face of violence. This series forms part of an ongoing commemorative photographic series body of work. The first series of images, “Berenice 10-28”, was produced in Johannesburg in 2010. In numbered, monochromatic stills, nineteen brown women of similar age offer themselves as surrogate presences - ‘standing in’ for Berenice, as each of them marks another year unlived. A decade later in the making, “Berenice 29-39” (2022) reanimates this “life work of mourning”, this time in colour. Occupying a spectral field of pink and purple hues, the collaborating sitters present an expanded community of peers – artists, writers, musicians, activists, mothers, friends - older now, but still bearing this name as a collective work of refusal. In each series, the artist herself participates.
“New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging” is on view at MoMA, New York until 17 January 2026.
Learn more about each artist’s work in the “Forum on Contemporary Photography: Lines of Belonging” which took place on 8 September 2025.
