For fifteen years Ala Kheir has photographed the riverbanks of Khartoum. Their light. Their edges. The life that gathers where land meets water. Then war reached the city and the river was suddenly out of reach. His photographs have become an archive he never meant to make: a world that no longer exists in the way he knew it.
They hold a river that keeps on moving and someone who cannot go back to it. They ask a question I have been living with too. What holds us when the ground we knew is no longer there?
Stories are meant to move beyond where they were first told. I Witnessed This has decided to keep walking.
On 14th November it opens at MaNdebele Photo Gallery in Soweto and stays until the end of January next year. If all goes well it will travel on to Everyday Lusaka in Zambia. I am still a little amazed writing those words.
I keep returning to the night it first opened at the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town. Bringing it to life was one of the richest experiences of my working life. For months I worked alongside fellow members of The Photographic Collective and ideas passed between us like gifts. Then the doors opened and the room filled and what we had made together began to belong to everyone.
Now the photographs are going somewhere that feels exactly right. MaNdebele is a people's gallery in Braamfischerville. It is a place where communities tell their stories in the ways they know best and where young people are handed the camera as a way of seeing their own world. An exhibition about who gets to bear witness could not ask for a better room. I love the thought of a child in Soweto standing before Ala's river and the work of the other twelve artists. And I love imagining what that child might one day make with a camera of their own.
MaNdebele Photo Gallery · 9737 Old Cemetery Road · Braamfischerville · Soweto · 14th November 2026 to end of January 2027
Ala Kheir, Under the Bridge (from the series By the River)
The pull of two places in 2026
I have thought a great deal about gravity this year. Each crossing between England and South Africa leaves me a little less certain which ground I am standing on. I pack and unpack. I wake in one hemisphere and dream in the other. Movement has given me so much. It has also taught me how easily a person can come loose.
Toni Morrison ends Song of Solomon with a line I carry with me: “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Some days I manage that. On others I simply long for something to hold me down.
Two waters
That longing lives at the heart of Between Two Grounds, my solo exhibition opening at HUB at Spier Arts Trust in Cape Town in February.
More than two hundred years ago my ancestors left Gravesend at the mouth of the Thames and sailed for the Eastern Cape. They arrived on a frontier where the Great Fish River had been drawn as a boundary. A line of water decided who could cross and who could belong. I have spent years going back to that river and listening to what it holds.
The new work moves between those two waters. Cloth carries ochre ground from the rocks of the Great Fish. It is a pigment central to Xhosa practice that colonial rule once forbade. Once again I have made work with the Keiskamma Art Project. Their embroidery runs through some of the pieces like a strong current. It is a conversation that began with Cuttings 1820–2020 and deepened this spring in River Boundaries with Anita Joice in Oxfordshire.
A river is never neutral. It divides and it carries. Somewhere in that double nature I have found the place I actually live. The exhibition will not offer an answer. It asks only that we stand in the in-between and pay close attention.
A place to land
And so after a year of tides I have done something wonderfully steady. I have taken a space of my own at OVADA in Oxford.
The summer residency there gave me my first true studio in this country. It took only a month to know I did not want to leave. OVADA is a generous house of artists with open doors and a kindness that runs right through it. I have missed that kind of company more than I knew. There is something about working beside other people that steadies the hand.
When I come back from South Africa a room will be ready for me. I wonder what work is waiting in the wings there for me to make.
Perhaps this is what gravity really is. Not stillness but a centre that holds you while everything else moves. Morrison was right that we can ride the air. Yet even a bird needs a branch to come back to. A river can only carry anything because it has banks.
Thank you for walking beside me this year. Wherever you are in the world I wish you a gentle season with a little stillness and somewhere soft to land.
With warmth from between two grounds
Pippa
