Moletelo: A Gathering of Memories, 2026: Frans Thoka

In Sepedi culture, moletelo is a night vigil, a gathering where people wait through the dark together, in mourning or in ceremony, holding space for the living and the ancestors alike. The word holds both the waiting and the gathering in one breath.

This exhibition started with a photo album my maternal grandmother lent me. As I turned the pages, I found faces I had not seen in years. Most of them I could not even name anymore. I started asking myself: Will I ever see these faces/people again, especially the ones still alive? Will we only meet at funerals? So I decided to make them meet here instead.

Scholars who study family photography describe the family album as a space where personal and collective memory meet, a repository of emotional and social communication that reaches far beyond the individual owner. Marianne Hirsch calls this "postmemory", the way experiences from before our time get transmitted through family stories and photographs so deeply that they come to feel like our own memories. My grandmother's album became my archive, and I started thinking about what it means to inherit memories and what these memories mean from one generation to the next.

The work spans sculpture, installation, textiles, drawing, and oil painting. Each piece is my way of thinking about what it means to gather, in celebration, in grief, in the ordinary rooms where family converges and memory gets handed down. Scholars have shown that what we keep - photographs, documents, heirlooms - consciously or unconsciously moulds a sense of family identity. I am thinking about the objects and traditions that survive into contemporary life, and the complicated relationships between different cultural groups, the ways we are connected and the ways we are not.

As José van Dijck argues, photographs are no longer just about safekeeping memory; they have become tools for identity formation and for connecting with others. That is what this exhibition is. Not polished. Just trying to bring people together, the ones in the album and the ones in the room. That is what this exhibition is reaching for. As I have been saying: After all, we are memories in time, and time does not exist. That makes us immortal. We wait, and in the waiting, we gather.

- Frans Thoka, 2026