mowa: atang tshikare's metaphysical ecosystem

Beyond his own work in art and adornment, Atang Tshikare has continuously created space for a wider conversation around African indigenous knowledge, working alongside master artisans, thinkers, and storytellers. His projects become sites of exchange, where clay, soil, wood and metal connect contemporary practice with generations of knowledge, while marks, forms and textures carry stories of place, memory and making.

His newest exhibition, Mowa, explores African ideas of transcendence through systems of spiritual ascent rooted in Tswana, Sotho, and Pedi metaphysical thought. Opening at Everard Read on 6 August, the exhibition unfolds as a kind of metaphysical ecosystem where sculpture, shadow, space, and elevation work together as one interconnected environment. Birds appear as ancestral messengers and spiritual intermediaries, representing guidance, healing, prayer, divination, and communal protection.

Meaning both “air” and “spirit,” the exhibition looks at the tension between visible order and invisible chaos: the structured world we move through versus the unseen ancestral, emotional, and spiritual forces shaping human transformation. The works suggest that enlightenment comes through engaging with this unseen space rather than avoiding it. This body of work marks a new direction within Atang Tshikare’s sculptural practice, expanding beyond object-making into a more immersive spatial experience. Through suspended forms, symbolism, and architectural movement, Mowa invites viewers into a space of spiritual flight, reflection, and awakening.

Alongside Tshikare’s exhibition, Everard Read will also open Sasha Hartslief’s The Quiet Hour and Lorienne Lotz’s Uncommon Sense, bringing three distinct perspectives into conversation around perception, memory and the complexities of being human. In The Quiet Hour, Hartslief turns her attention to the quiet theatre of everyday life. Her paintings capture people absorbed in ordinary moments, often viewed through windows and framed by the changing qualities of natural light. Colour becomes a way of setting the emotional temperature of each scene, while interiors, objects and fleeting gestures suggest lives continuing beyond the frame. There is a sense of intimacy in these moments of stillness, where nothing remarkable is happening and yet everything feels quietly charged.

Lotz’s Uncommon Sense takes a more fractured view of the contemporary world, examining truth, power, oppression and the contradictions of human behaviour. Drawing from art history, literature and the absurdity of everyday language, her paintings navigate the space between order and chaos, humour and brutality, tenderness and violence. Figures emerge through layers of construction, erasure and revision, reflecting a world in which familiar structures and certainties appear increasingly unstable. Rather than offering resolution, the works ask what it means to remain human amid that uncertainty.

Together, the three exhibitions offer different ways of looking at what lies beneath the visible: Tshikare through spiritual and ancestral worlds, Hartslief through the emotional charge of ordinary life, and Lotz through the contradictions and fractures of contemporary society.

Don’t miss the opening of all three distinct exhibitions at Everard Read, 6 August, 17:00.