WeeklySA_AdminBEAUTY: A multidisciplinary exhibition at the ORMS School of Photography in Cape Town brings together women artists whose work embraces beauty, softness, play and excess as meaningful forms of expression and resistance…
By WSAM Reporter
The many faces of femininity — from the playful and tender to the stylish, emotional and excessive — are being celebrated in Pretty Serious, a group exhibition marking Women’s Month in Cape Town.
Presented by the ORMS School of Photography in collaboration with Art School Africa, the exhibition opened on August 6 and runs until August 29.
Pretty Serious brings together a diverse group of Cape Town-based artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage and fibre art.
The exhibition explores femininity as a space of imagination, contradiction, experimentation and fun. Its participating artists reflect on what it means to take beauty seriously, find power in softness, romanticise everyday life, embrace excess and perform femininity on their own terms.
At the heart of the exhibition is an unapologetic reclamation of being “just a girl” — not as a dismissal of women’s experiences, but as a delicate form of resistance to the often heavy and restrictive discourse surrounding womanhood.
It creates room for the joy and freedom of girlhood to flourish while encouraging women to reconnect with the unfiltered dimensions of their feminine identities.
Beauty, tenderness and playfulness are presented as a salve for the shame that women are often conditioned to associate with femininity. The exhibition argues that joy itself can be powerful and that softness should not be mistaken for weakness.
“Limitless joy, tenderness and play can be pretty serious indeed,” the organisers said.
Curated and produced by Buchanan & Co., the exhibition features work by Alexia Smit, Alka Jiven, Celeste Jacobs, Edinah Chagwedera, Inge Prins, Kauthar Kamish, Khanyisa Buthelezi, Kristen McClarty, Zarah Cassim, Nina Turok Shapiro, Lauren Hendricks, Martha Kubule, Myra Brown, Sanell Aggenbach and Antonia Steyn.
Other participating artists include Reem Aljeally, Sera Holland, Sharday Swanepoel, Sundus Saad and Zimkhitha Mabonga.
The exhibition is the second annual Women’s Month collaboration between ORMS and Art School Africa, following the launch of Many Selves in August 2025.
Art School Africa is a non-profit organisation that supports emerging artists, curators, writers and other art practitioners by equipping them with practical skills and business knowledge. Its programmes are built around education, mentorship and access to the art market.
The organisation also works with the Harvard University Center for African Studies to research challenges and skills shortages confronting art practitioners in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent.
Through Pretty Serious, the collaborators seek to provide artists with a platform for creative exchange while inviting audiences to reconsider traditional ideas about femininity.
The result is an exhibition that treats joy, beauty and play not as superficial distractions, but as legitimate sources of identity, agency and power.
