At ORMS School of Photography, a Women’s Month exhibition brings together 20 artists to explore femininity through joy, beauty, performance, tenderness and excess — proposing softness not as the opposite of power, but as one of its many forms.
In conversations around womanhood, seriousness has often been associated with struggle: questions of inequality, representation, violence, exclusion, labour and the continuing negotiation for space. While these conversations remain essential, Pretty Serious, a group exhibition currently on view at ORMS School of Photography in Cape Town, asks what else might become possible when femininity is approached through pleasure, play and imagination.
Presented by ORMS School of Photography in collaboration with Art School Africa and curated and produced by Buchanan & Co., Pretty Serious brings together 20 artists whose practices move across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage and fibre art.
Running from 6–29 August 2026 as part of South Africa’s Women’s Month, the exhibition turns towards the playful, performative, tender, excessive, stylish, emotional and occasionally ridiculous dimensions of femininity.
At its centre is a deceptively simple proposition: joy can be serious, too.
Reclaiming the Language of Girlhood
The exhibition takes contemporary ideas surrounding girlhood and femininity — including the seemingly dismissive phrase “just a girl” — and considers how they might instead become forms of self-definition.
Rather than treating femininity as something that must be justified, restrained or made respectable, Pretty Serious creates room for its contradictions.
A woman can be soft and powerful. Beauty can be pleasurable without being superficial. Excess can become intentional. Sentimentality can carry meaning. The everyday can be romanticised. Femininity itself can be performed, exaggerated, questioned or embraced.
The exhibition consequently moves away from the expectation that representations of women must always communicate strength through hardness or resistance through confrontation.
Instead, softness becomes its own vocabulary.
Tenderness, decoration, beauty, humour and play are approached not as distractions from more substantial conversations about womanhood but as legitimate ways of understanding women’s interior and exterior worlds.
In this sense, Pretty Serious is interested in what happens when women are allowed to experience femininity without apology.
When Joy Becomes Resistance
There is a subtle tension running through the exhibition’s premise.
To celebrate beauty, pleasure and girlhood might initially appear removed from the political questions historically associated with representations of women. Yet the exhibition proposes that the freedom to experience joy can itself carry significance.
Women have long encountered expectations surrounding how they should look, behave, dress, speak and occupy public and private spaces. Femininity can consequently become a site where social expectations and individual desires continuously collide.
Pretty Serious responds by opening space for what it describes as the “many, unfiltered parts of the feminine experience.”
Beauty and playfulness become a salve against inherited shame. Romanticising the everyday becomes a means of giving ordinary experiences value. Embracing excess pushes against expectations of restraint.
And being “just a girl” can become less an admission of limitation than an unapologetic declaration of self.
The exhibition does not attempt to settle on a single definition of femininity. Instead, it embraces its instability.
Femininity can be sincere and performative, intimate and public, excessive and delicate, humorous and deeply emotional — sometimes simultaneously.
That multiplicity is precisely the point.
Twenty Artists, Multiple Perspectives
The breadth of Pretty Serious is reinforced by the range of artists and practices assembled for the exhibition.
Participating artists include Alexia Smit, Alka Jiven, Celeste Jacobs, Edinah Chagwedera, Inge Prins, Kauthar Kamish, Khanyisa Buthelezi, Kristen McClarty, Zarah Cassim, Nina Turok Shapiro, Lauren Hendricks, Martha Kubule, Myra Brown, Sanell Aggenbach and Antonia Steyn, Reem Aljeally, Sera Holland, Sharday Swanepoel, Sundus Saad and Zimkhitha Mabonga.
Across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage and fibre art, their works approach femininity not as a fixed identity but as a territory for experimentation.
This multidisciplinary structure is important.
The exhibition’s interest in femininity is not limited to what is represented in an artwork. Material, texture, colour, composition and process also become ways of communicating ideas around softness, excess, beauty, memory, intimacy and self-presentation.
Together, the artists offer multiple entry points into a subject that cannot easily be contained by a singular narrative.
Rather than asking audiences to determine what femininity is, the exhibition is more interested in what femininity can do: how it can be inhabited, performed, enjoyed, challenged, exaggerated and continually reinvented.
Beyond the Burden of Representation
Pretty Serious arrives within a wider contemporary art landscape in which women artists are increasingly occupying spaces from which they were historically excluded.
Yet visibility alone does not necessarily eliminate the burden of representation.
Women artists can still encounter expectations that their work must explain womanhood, address gender politics or represent particular collective experiences. African women artists can face additional pressure to carry narratives around geography, identity, history and social conditions.
Against that backdrop, the freedom to make work concerned with beauty, fantasy, pleasure or the apparently frivolous takes on another dimension.
Pretty Serious allows these subjects to exist without immediately reducing them to superficiality.
The exhibition’s title captures this tension particularly well.
“Pretty” carries associations with beauty and appearance, qualities historically coded as feminine and sometimes dismissed as lacking intellectual depth. “Serious”, meanwhile, suggests weight, consequence and legitimacy.
Placing the two together collapses that hierarchy.
Something can be pretty and serious.
Something can be pleasurable and meaningful.
And an artwork does not necessarily need to abandon beauty, sentimentality or femininity to possess conceptual weight.
Building on Many Selves
The exhibition also represents the continuation of a developing Women’s Month programme between ORMS and Art School Africa.
Pretty Serious is the second iteration of their annual exhibition following Many Selves, launched in August 2025.
The continuation gives the initiative significance beyond a once-off Women’s Month event. Instead, it establishes the possibility of an evolving annual platform through which different aspects of women’s creative practices and experiences can be examined.
Art School Africa’s involvement further connects the exhibition to broader questions around infrastructure within Africa’s cultural ecosystem.
The registered non-profit works with emerging artists, curators, writers and other art professionals across South Africa and the wider African continent, focusing on the practical knowledge required to develop sustainable careers.
Its programmes are structured around three central pillars: education, mentorship and market access.
Through research conducted in collaboration with the Harvard University Center for African Studies, the organisation also works to identify skills gaps and structural challenges affecting practitioners within the art industry, translating those findings into workshops, mentorship, talks and exhibition opportunities.
In this context, Pretty Serious functions not only as an exhibition about femininity but also as part of an ecosystem concerned with creating opportunities for artistic visibility.
Curating Femininity Without Defining It
The exhibition is curated and produced by Buchanan & Co., the Cape Town-based strategic advisory founded by art advisor and cultural strategist Julia Buchanan.
Working primarily within contemporary art from Africa, Buchanan & Co.’s practice spans collection building, art strategy, exhibitions and commissions for private and corporate clients and cultural organisations.
Buchanan’s experience across institutions including Zeitz MOCAA, Norval Foundation and the Harvard University Center for African Studies Art Initiative Group informs a curatorial framework in Pretty Serious that appears deliberately expansive.
Rather than using the exhibition to prescribe a particular interpretation of womanhood, the curatorial proposition allows contradiction to remain visible.
That is important because there can be no universal feminine experience.
Femininity is shaped by culture, age, race, class, sexuality, geography, personal history and countless other conditions. Even an individual’s relationship with femininity can change throughout a lifetime.
By approaching the subject through imagination, experimentation and pleasure rather than attempting to produce a definitive statement, Pretty Serious makes room for those differences.
Creating Space for Creative Exchange
The choice of ORMS School of Photography as the exhibition’s setting also situates the project within a wider creative community.
For more than three decades, ORMS has operated within South Africa’s photography and visual arts landscape, working across photographic equipment, fine-art and photographic printing, framing, exhibition production, rentals, education and other creative services.
Through initiatives including its educational programming and exhibition activities, the organisation has increasingly become part of the infrastructure surrounding photographers, filmmakers, artists and other visual practitioners.
The partnership with Art School Africa therefore brings together exhibition-making, education, professional development and market access — areas that remain critical to strengthening sustainable creative careers.
Taking Softness Seriously
Perhaps the most compelling idea within Pretty Serious is its refusal to establish a hierarchy between joy and struggle.
The exhibition does not suggest that the difficult conversations surrounding womanhood have disappeared. Nor does it propose that beauty and play can resolve the structural realities women continue to navigate.
Instead, it argues for something equally necessary: the right to complexity.
Women should not have to be defined solely through resistance to the conditions around them.
There must also be space for pleasure.
For dressing up.
For tenderness.
For humour.
For beauty.
For sentimentality.
For contradiction.
For being excessive.
For romanticising an ordinary afternoon.
For creating simply because something feels joyful.
And for deciding, individually, what femininity means.
By placing those experiences within the context of an exhibition, Pretty Serious asks viewers to reconsider the cultural distinction between what is regarded as substantial and what is dismissed as frivolous.
Because softness does not necessarily signal weakness, and beauty does not automatically mean superficiality.
Sometimes play is political. Sometimes joy is restorative. Sometimes choosing tenderness in a world that repeatedly demands hardness is itself an assertion of agency.
And sometimes being “just a girl” can be pretty serious.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition: Pretty Serious
Dates: 6–29 August 2026
Venue: ORMS School of Photography, 56 Roeland Street, Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa
Presented by: ORMS School of Photography and Art School Africa
Curated and produced by: Buchanan & Co.
Focus: Women’s Month 2026
Pretty Serious is on view at ORMS School of Photography in Cape Town through 29 August 2026.
