ORMS School of Photography, in collaboration with Art School Africa, opens Pretty Serious, a group exhibition celebrating Women’s Month, on view from 6 to 29 August, 2026.
Pretty Serious marks the second iteration of ORMS and Art School Africa’s annual Women’s Month exhibition, following the inaugural Many Selves in August 2025.
Pretty Serious explores the playful, performative, excessive, tender, ridiculous, stylish, emotional and joyful dimensions of femininity. The unapologetic reclamation of being “just a girl” is itself a delicate art of resistance — a light feminine touch applied to the long, heavy discourse on womanhood.
Engaging with femininity
The exhibition opens up space for blissful girlhood to roam free, encouraging a tapping into the many, unfiltered parts of the feminine experience. Here, beauty, joy and playfulness are offered as salve for indoctrinated feminine shame, and as a reminder that limitless joy, tenderness and play can be pretty serious indeed.
Invited artists engage with femininity as a space of imagination, contradiction, experimentation and fun — exploring what it means to take beauty seriously, to find power in softness, to romanticise the everyday, embrace excess, or perform femininity on one’s own terms.
The exhibition, curated and produced by Buchanan & Co., brings together a wide range of Cape Town-based practices spanning painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage and fibre art, with works 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, Reem Aljeally, Sera Holland, Sharday Swanepoel, Sundus Saad, and Zimkhitha Mabonga.
Opening event
The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 6 August, with a Collectors’ Preview from 5:00–6:00 pm, offering an opportunity to meet the artists and hear more about their practices ahead of the public opening. The exhibition will then be open to the public from 6:00–8:00 pm.
Pictures: Top Reem Aljeally. Middle: Lauren Hendricks.
