As the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2025 approaches, the spotlight shines brightly on a dynamic lineup of women artists whose works redefine boundaries and narratives. As we celebrate The Manor’s latest publication, Women In Art, we thought it would be fitting to highlight some of the women at this year’s art fair, from multidisciplinary practices to deeply personal explorations of identity, culture, and heritage, these artists exemplify the power of contemporary art to provoke thought and inspire connection
Paula Agostinho (Angola)
Paula Agostinho is a multidisciplinary artist from Luanda, Angola, whose work as a photographer, writer, director, and singer bridges visual and narrative storytelling. She currently mentors creative workshops while continuing her work across photography, writing, and film, capturing stories that speak to beauty, resilience, and identity. Her artistic process begins with observation and connection and memory: remembering people’s tones of voice, their children’s name, their faces, and being able to reconnect with them the next day. She fully immerses herself immerse myself in the environment, visiting often, sometimes with no camera.Her current body of work, the series “Play at the Harbour” was inspired by a chance encounter with a young girl, Kleicy, during a visit to Mindelo’s harbour in Cape Verde. Observing Kleicy navigate this challenging environment, a space dominated by adult men marked by hardship and where I wouldn’t anticipate a young girl to be, sparked her curiosity about how a child could find moments of play and joy in such surroundings.
Grace Nyahangare (Zimbabwe)
Born and based in Harare, Zimbabwe, Grace Nyahangare is a young painter, who is building up her practice on a foundation of printmaking and photography, which inform both the technical and intellectual elements of her work. Her dreamlike, surreal and dynamically passionate canvases are the result of passing through numerous metamorphoses starting as observations and photographs which are then made into monotypes which then acquire a new environment on canvases in which paint is also transformed through interaction with printers ink to yield a poignancy and otherworldliness. Detachment, reflection and recomposition are synergistic with the ideas that Grace has been working with from the earliest stages of her evolution as an artist, and trying to find whole in a space of cultural and relationship otherness.
Bonolo Kavula (South Africa)
Returning to this year’s art fair and exhibiting with SMAC Gallery is South African artist Bonolo Kavula. The Kimberley-born, Cape Town-based artist’s work has existed between the intersections of painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture, pushing the limitations of each. Initially creating punched circular discs from canvas, Kavula has moved to using traditional shweshwe cloth, invoking cultural, ancestral, archival and historical connotations specific to her multiple oeuvres. Kavula’s art and art-making practice can be seen as asking critical questions about art itself. In this sense her artworks are self-aware, deconstructing and abstracting the medium to its most basic parts. Kavula configures simplistic yet mathematically intricate and calculated (by observation) artworks, using basic components such as line, colour and texture to create spatial fields of depth.
Khanyi Mawhayi (South Africa)
Born in 1998 in Kagiso, South Africa, Khanyi Mawhayi is an artist, writer, and curator who has worked in multiple disciplines. Colour is an important aspect of her work for how it can evoke personal as well as cultural associations. For instance, her richly-coloured depictions of xibelani skirts, made with soft pastels on black backgrounds, probed the ways in which the colours of the skirts themselves were not only aesthetically compelling, but served as a means through which the artist could express her curiosity with her own Tsonga heritage. In her most recent body of work, titled ‘Black and White Paradise,’ Mawhayi has expanded her palette to include bold colours in creamy oil stick to explore more sentimental relationships between colour and emotion, or colour and memory. While the resulting works are relatively simple in gesture and
abstract in form, their significance is felt in their accumulation and how each ‘gold sticker’ served as a “reward for the daily work of living.” This kind of process-based approach is an important feature of Mawhayi’s practice as a whole. Drawing references from art history, music, literature, popular culture and personal experience, she sees her wider practice as a reflection on her mission toward comfortably existing in multiplicity.
Joy Adeboye (Nigeria)
Joy Adeboye is a contemporary Nigerian artist and painter who usually draws on personal references as the catalyst for her work. Adeboye creates layered compositions based on her study of emotional alchemy, spirituality and the general workings of the human mind. Emerging out of the Nigerian panorama, the strength of her narratives are heavily influenced by her literary background as she incorporates a poetic storytelling approach in her practice. In February 2024, she was included in “The Vanguard ” marking her first presentation with AMG Projects and is making her debut at Investec Art Fair 2025 within the much-anticipated Tomorrows/ Today section.
