Two of South Africa’s most respected and fearless artists, Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli, have joined creative forces for Junkyard Dogs, an exhibition running from August 29 to October 31 at The Melrose Gallery in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg.
Known for transforming discarded materials into haunting, monumental works, Bester and Ntuli are masters of making beauty out of junk. The exhibition dives deep into themes of resistance, resilience and reinvention, fusing sculpture, sound and installation to create a powerful, immersive experience.
“In African art the animistic and industrial collide,” said co-curators Ashraf Jamal and Tumi Moloi, who described Junkyard Dogs as a “reckoning with our past, an engagement with our present and a question posed to our future”.
Bester, whose work critiques injustice using scrap metal, shoes of missing children and symbols of apartheid, says being apolitical is “a dangerous luxury we cannot afford”.
Ntuli, meanwhile, creates monumental stone and metal sculptures that echo ancestral spirits and the brutal scars of colonialism. His work, philosophical and visceral, is deeply rooted in the African renaissance.
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