Junkyard Dogs, a collaborative exhibition by celebrated South African artists Dr Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli, opened on 29 August and will run until 31 October 2025 at The Melrose Gallery.
Co-curated by Tumi Moloi and Ashraf Jamal, the exhibition invites audiences to engage with artworks that reckon with the past, confront the present, and imagine future possibilities, all through the unique lens of discarded materials. By disassembling and reassembling industrial waste, the artists transform ruin into creation, exploring both the fragility and resilience of existence.
The exhibition features large-scale, vibrant sculptures in metal and granite that are at once bare-bones and totemic. Rather than delivering overt political messages, Bester and Ntuli capture the essence of being African in a contemporary and post-colonial context. The works interrogate fundamental questions: What does the industrial debris that surrounds us say about who we are? How have external forces shaped and molded our identities and resistance? The art is widely resonant, asking viewers to reflect on reconstruction, memory, and the possibility of reinvention.
Dr Willie Bester, internationally recognized as one of South Africa’s foremost resistance artists, incorporates recycled materials into his assemblages and sculptures to critique political, social, and economic injustice. His larger-than-life pieces and numerous accolades, including the Order of the Disa, make him a defining figure in contemporary South African art. Pitika Ntuli, a renowned resistance figure and former Director at Sankofa Institute for the African Renaissance, brings a poetic, skeletal aesthetic to his work, reflecting loneliness and post-colonial experience through metal, wood, and stone. Together, the artists’ vision in Junkyard Dogs is a seamless marriage of intellect, history, and creative ingenuity, establishing a space where waste, memory, and identity converge.
