Online Catalogue

19.07.2025 - 24.08.2025

Opening on Saturday, July 19th, from 5 - 8 PM
Location: NMAG, Bos en Lommerweg 88-90
NMAG KIOSK, Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327

thrifting as method
by Mpho Matsipa
Johannesburg, 2025

Jamal Nxedlana is interested in used clothing in Johannesburg. This pre-occupation has shifted and developed as his practice has expanded including his studies in Fashion Design and the role of used clothing as a vehicle of self-expression, or an article of exchange and when a cipher for narrative expression for photo shoots and other creative purposes. Johannesburg central business district (CBD) was once a booming mining town and the fulcrum of white settler colonial modernity, that now inhabits a dichotomous discursive zone between either being a bustling, elusive African metropolis[1] or a ‘ruin’ of racial capitalism, spatial violence and racialized abandonment[2]. Nxedlana, eschews these binary oppositions. He deploys his background in fashion design to explore how fashion might respond to colonial and postcolonial legacies in urban South Africa. This interest has manifested in his exploration of used clothing markets in the city through photography, moving image and textile art. The city offers a mis-end-scene for aliveness through the tropes of recycling, up cycling and their relationship to the reduction of waste, conservation of resources and savings on dumping sites.

While the work obliquely registers growing concerns over the impact of disposal of post-consumer textiles waste in Africa, and the dual environmental challenges posed by fast fashion and its related ecological toxicity, Nxedlana’s practice of thrifting re figures Johannesburg as a site of diverse cultural identities that intersect with practices, technologies and logistics that invite geopolitical inquiry with practices that combines sorting, selection, discernment and bargain hunting and decomposition with a focus on sustainability and resourcefulness and re-invention. This creative preoccupation with a tumultuous city with a long history of extractivism, offers rich grounds for speculating about how discarded personal artefacts - ‘transitory kinship structures’[3] - become vehicles that enable dreaming of a future within and against the structural failings that mark our present.

Nxedlana’s relentless exploration of thrifting as a mapping technique: sporadically visiting, geo-locating, photographing, filming and pinning locations of used clothing stores and markets that intersect with Google Earth screenshots from various angles, remembers the central business district of Johannesburg as a constellation of clothing ecosystems, narratives, bodies, and temporalities against the regimentation of dedicated inventory delivery and stocking days. In his collages, the city is reconstituted as a rhizomatic field of encounters, and repetition without serialization. An unexpected combination of textures, a disturbing stain, a tear, a loose thread or distressed fabric not only bespeaks a previous life, long since discarded and forgotten, but the base for material transformation. His process of tagging, layering and enfolding mirrors the spacetime of this part of the inner city, and how rhythms of thrifting can register improvisational, speculative and provisional quality of some of Johannesburg’s densest urban spaces.

Nxedlana’s city is far from topological. He works photographs or found visual imagery, to make collages as a way of testing the relationship between different places or different objects or just putting ideas onto a surface. Working between images taken from Google Earth, together with photographs that he has taken of the places that are specifically related to the selling of used clothing and either sellers, shoppers, or creative entrepreneurs emerge as the outcome of his research on yolo (object detection algorithm) but also on data visualisation practices, techniques in scientific research and art practice. It's a reimagining of the city as datascape, and that used clothing is encoded with data in a wider sense. The collage as a poetic tactic to register data collection in a rippling field of micro-gestures generates a speculative and poetic cartography of the city’s thrifting eco-systems. It draws you into an intimate relationship, with geopolitical and cultural questions as an act of what Tina Campt (2019) terms, ‘critical relationality’. In another series Made In Joburg he unpicks the garment labels, mining them for hidden narratives relating to the practice of used clothing: how it's shipped and ends up in South Africa. He states:

“(I’m interested in) hidden narratives or maybe not hidden narratives, but not just the narratives that are embedded in the clothing itself, so perhaps where it was made, for which company was it made, where was it sold? So, the actual material data, embedded in used clothes or factual data, but then also speculative data was something I was interested in. So, kind of thinking about the people who may have owned these clothes, the activities they would have done, the journey that the clothing has taken etc. And then as I was kind of, I guess mapping, and this is kind of like my mood board for the project and where I've put works in progress or kind of like sketches.”

Music, fashion, and experimentation are defining features of many African cities—where thrifting plays a key role in youth expression and refusal of hegemonic discourses that foreclose other possible narratives, imaginaries, practices and condition[4]. This fragmentation of micro-gestures in an over- determined, yet indeterminate space of the body, and the city, enacts both a refusal of a single point of view and an affirmation of multiplicity and undecidability of African urban sub-culture. Nxedlana’s scalar shifts and recalibrations are themselves quiet acts of refusal, that simultaneously assert the possibility of world-building in the face of negations, that renders us and our environment unintelligible and disposable.[5] However, his study of stains also offer a re mapping of geopolitical intimacies, a temporal suspension of spatial hierarchies that opens up questions about the foundations of everything, from the machinations of late state capitalism, to the way bodies, and identities, might mingle, touch each other, and leave traces that could lead to material and affective transformations – albeit in radically asymmetrical ways[6].

Nxedlana’s thrifting-as-method serves as a capacious and generative re-imagining of everyday practices that fundamentally scramble stable identities as well as what it means to refuse the terms given to us. In their most utopian light these textile time capsules might be vessels for world-building and coded information exchange[7]. Although they are coeval with uni-directional toxic infrastructures of global trade and disposal, they nevertheless give rise to experimentation and sub-cultures in music and fashion that are the hallmark of dynamic cities in Africa, and the ambivalence and violence of geopolitical intimacies.[8] In this body of work, Nxedlana offers a momentary reprieve: a tactile, sensory engagement with these textiles in a universe of reciprocal exchanges that are familiar, playful, intimate and strange - perhaps a clearing for meaning-making through a sensorial and philosophical response to complex global systems.

References:
[1] Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe, eds. Johannesburg: the elusive metropolis. Duke University Press, 2020.
[2] Simone, AbdouMaliq. "People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg." Public culture 16.3 (2004): 407-429.
[3] Brown, DeForrest. Assembling a Black Counterculture. New York: Primary Information, 2022. And Wark, McKenzie. Raving. Duke University Press, 2023.
[4] Zililo, Marion, “Interview with thulile Gamedze” in La belle Revue (2018) https://labellerevue.org/en/global terroir/le- cap/entretien-avec-thulile-gamedze
[5] Campt, Tina Marie. "Black visuality and the practice of refusal." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29.1 (2019): 79-87.
[6] Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by empire: Geographies of intimacy in North American history. Duke University Press, 2006. And Pain, R., & Staeheli, L. (2014). Introduction: Intimacy-geopolitics and violence on JSTOR. Area, 344. https://doi.org/24811736
[7] Malatsie, Kabelo, and Lantian Xie, eds. Matter Mattering Matters: A Scienticity Reader. Mousse Publishing, 2025.
[8] Desmond, Vincent, Photos: A Look Inside Nigeria's Alté Subculture, OkayAfrica, https://www.okayafrica.com/nigeria-alte- subculture-inside-photos-look/ also see Jade, Diana, 6 reasons thrift clothing is popular among younger Nairobians (2025) https://www.pulselive.co.ke/articles/lifestyle/fashion/reasons-thrift-clothing-is-popular-among-kenyan- youths-2025061914011052850

Jamal Nxedlana (b. 1985, SA) is an artist and cultural worker. His practice begins with fashion and subculture as domains of intellectual and cultural inquiry, from which to respond to colonial and apartheid legacies in urban South Africa. He has exhibited internationally in galleries, institutions, and independent spaces.

Recent exhibitions include SPECTRUM (2023), his second solo exhibition at No Man’s Art Gallery in Amsterdam; The New Black Vanguard (2022) curated by Antwaun Sargent at Saatchi Gallery in London; and Orlando (2022) curated by Tilda Swinton at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

As a cultural worker, Nxedlana founded Bubblegum Club, a digital platform and culture agency showcasing innovative new work and creating opportunities for emerging creatives. He is also a founding member of CUSS Group, a Johannesburg based art collective that has exhibited in major institutions including Kunsthall Trondheim Norway, Moderna Museet Stockholm, de Young Museum and the Berlin Biennale.

His current project, Data Tapestries, maps social, cultural and economic activity related to used-clothing from Western countries in African cities, while exploring themes such as memory, data and innovation.

We are honored to announce that Benjamin Francis will be part of the upcoming group exhibition Traces We Keep at Brutus, Rotterdam. This exhibition is part of the third edition of Wild Summer of Art, uses the ruins of the Brutus building as a starting point to explore memory and imagination. It reflects on what remains after turbulent times and how traces of the past shape our view of the future. The artists reveal memory as a scar of history, yet also a source of insight, creativity, and hope.

Curated by Yannick Güldner and Jeanette Bisschops.

More information at Brutus.

Online Catalogue

Press:
Away From Basel’s Main Halls, June Art Fair Holds Its Own, in the Observer, June 2025

JUNE Art Fair
Riehenstrasse 90B
4058 Basel, Switzerland
16 - 22 June 2025

We are honoured to debut with a solo presentation by Benjamin Francis at JUNE Art Fair 2025, in Basel, Switzerland.

This fair is kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fonds.

ONLINE CATALOGUE

Press:

Review on Intsomi in Metropolis M, by Karmen Samson, May 2025
On Intsomi in ZAM Magazine, by Bart Luirink, June 2025

22.05.2025 - 06.07.2025

Opening Thursday May 22nd from 5 - 8 pm
Location: NMAG, Bos en Lommerweg 88 and NMAG KIOSK, Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327 Amsterdam.

No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to present Intsomi, the third solo exhibition by Buhlebezwe Siwani with the gallery. Siwani’s multidisciplinary practice ‒ spanning performance, photography, video and installation ‒ interrogates the patriarchal framing of the Black female body and experience within and beyond the South African context. As a Sangoma, she centres her work on ritual and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. 

In a present shaped by a rightward political shift that increasingly demonstrates resistance to historical reckoning and cultural inclusion, Intsomi offers an alternative narrative to divisive political rhetoric around race and migration. Buhlebezwe Siwani invites us to confront history not as a past, but as a living force carried in the body, land, and spiritual realm. 

In Xhosa, 'intsomi' means ‘tale,’ ‘legend,’ and ‘myth’ in story form, a word that resonates with the layered, inherited narratives Siwani seeks to reclaim. The eponymous sculptural flags Instomi (2025), hung throughout the exhibition, act as visual markers. Once red, white, and blue, they have been dredged and soaked in raw materials and spices. Here, past and present converge in acts of memory, resistance, and transformation.

The intersection of memory and myth materialises in the work Rhaxa Rhaxa (2025). Three hand carved stones, traditionally used in rural African communities for food preparation, become living archives for the artist; vessels of continuity ‒ objects that echo ancestral presence. Rhaxa Rhaxa is also an onomatopoeia: a word evoking the sound of something dragged along ‒  a weight, a lineage, a history that insists on being carried. 

In Sara (2025) and Sojourner (2025), Siwani imagines Sojourner Truth, the African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist ‒ not as subject of spectacle or distant memory, but as a woman returning home. In Izithunzi (2025), Siwani places her own body within the historical architecture of the Oost-Indisch Huis / Bushuis, former headquarters of the VOC, surrounded by colonial artefacts. Dressed in traditional Xhosa attire adorned with cowrie shells and beads, her presence physically interrupts the colonial narrative, staging a quiet resistance within a space marked by exploitation.  

Just as Rhaxa Rhaxa carries the traces of remains, the paintings and photographs animate what has been displaced, asking what it means to reclaim both space and (hi)story. A similar gesture extends into the earlier work Amagugu (2022), shown in the gallery’s mezzanine. In this video installation, Siwani appropriates Renaissance chiaroscuro to reimagine the Black body within a Western visual language. With a powerful gaze, Siwani’s subjects assert their presence in the canon.

Moving between the spiritual and the political, the intimate and the historical, Buhlebezwe Siwani creates a language of return ‒ one that refuses erasure and insists on presence. Intsomi ultimately gestures toward healing; not through forgetting but through the act of reimagining.

The opening of the exhibition will take place during Amsterdam Art Week, on Thursday May 22nd at 5PM, across both No Man’s Art Gallery (Bos en Lommerweg 88-90) and NMAG KIOSK (Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327). For more information, visit nomansart.com or email info@nomansart.com

Exhibition overview of I Hit You With a Flower — sugar-coated art with a punch at MABA, France. Photo by Aurélien Mole

We are honored to announce that Alan Hernández are be part of the exhibition I Hit You With a Flower – sugar-coated art with a punch at MABA, France. This eye-catchingly sweet exhibition celebrates diversity in society, taking back the power of ‘girly art’ through a glamorous presentation of vibrant colours, gold, glitter, flowers, and other motifs.

Curated by Nanda Janssen.

More information at MABA.

We are pleased to share that Marilyn Sonneveld is part of BEDROCK, a group exhibition organized by the Young Collectors Circle in collaboration with Amsterdam Art Week, held at Capital C in Amsterdam. The exhibition explores themes of resistance and resilience in both nature and the arts. Marilyn will present a selection of her paintings and glass works.

The exhibition runs from Friday, 21st May until Thursday, 4th September.

Find more information here.

Installation views of the exhibition Reverie at EDJI Gallery in Brussels, BE. Photos by Sylvia Cappelari

We are delighted to announce the opening of Reverie, a new solo exhibition by Marilyn Sonneveld at EDJI Gallery in Brussels. This exhibition presents her latest abstract-figurative paintings in dialogue with glass sculptures that explore themes of intimacy, personal memory, and the tension between presence and absence.

Please find further information here.

Online Catalogue

Press:
A correction of the norm, in Art Rotterdam article, March 2025

ART ROTTERDAM
Solo/Duo Section
Booth D10
27 - 30 March 2025

We are thrilled to present a duo presentation by Benjamin Francis and Tobias Thaens on the solo/duo section of Art Rotterdam 2025.

Photos by Jonathan de Waart

We are honoured to share that Sam Samiee will be curating and presenting works at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, NL.

In 2018 Sam Samiee won the Wolvecamp Prize, the exhibition offers a contemporary insight of Wolvecamp’s legacy, bridging work of Theo Wolvecamp and with that of Sam Samiee.

Please find further information here.

Photos courtesy of Museum Cobra and Fabian Landewee

online catalogue

Press:

Exhibition highlight on saliva.live, March 2025

A correction of the norm, in Art Rotterdam article, March 2025

22.03.2025 - 27.04.2025

Opening Saturday March 22nd from 5 - 8 pm

For his debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Benjamin Francis sought to create a space filled with windows, fences, and thresholds that function as both portals to another realm and barriers that exclude. They are more than mere architectural forms; they embody the contradictions of boundaries, shaping access while simultaneously denying it.

A Foot Between the Door is an act of staking a claim. Literally translated from a Dutch saying, it is used to assert presence in spaces that exclude, whether through physical barriers or institutional structures. It stands for the negotiation required to inhabit and navigate spaces where identity is regulated, challenged or contested. 

A work that pauses the visitor upon entering the exhibition space is The Smell of Boundaries (2025), a large-scale installation that explores the visceral, almost instinctual response one has to dirt and cleanliness. Dirt is something one is conditioned to be repulsed by, not necessarily through rational understanding, but through deep-seated social and biological instincts. Cleanliness is more than hygiene; it is a ritual that purifies a space, setting it apart from dirt and contamination. This distinction is not only physical but also symbolic.

In The Right to Opacity, the writer and poet Édouard Glissant rejects rigid borders, seeing them as fluid and liminal spaces of exchange. The Smell of Boundaries (2025) echoes this idea, where decay defies containment, seeping through divisions. Dirt, sweat, and rot reveal a hidden truth: borders are not just seen or felt but inhaled and carried within us.

Francis plays with transparency and opacity and befouls his works with greasy fingerprints, petroleum jelly, mold-like overgrowth, dead branches and fish eyes; materials that clash with the sterile, hyper-regulated confinements that hold them. They expose the tension between organic chaos and imposed order and act as metaphors for bodies existing outside the norm, resisting erasure in certain settings.  

Incorporating these ideas, the exhibition does not seek to collapse borders but to animate them, making supposedly neutral objects more alive. What happens when that which should remain outside begins to infiltrate windows, walls, and doorways? A Foot Between the Door challenges the audience to confront these borderlands: between inside and outside, purity and contamination, life and decay. Francis transforms the space into a site of tension and negotiation, and invites us to rethink the politics of exclusion and belonging.

No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to announce Vultures & Fireflies, the first institutional solo exhibition by Alejandro Galván in the Netherlands. Presented at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, the exhibition spans the entire house space to create a dynamic and evolving work that chronicles Galván’s home city of Nezahualcóyotl.

Brought to life through paintings, transfer prints, sculptures, and film, this powerful chronicle of Mexico merges elements from tabloid news, comic books, heavy metal, and folklore. Galván’s work appears to restore balance in a world marked by injustice and corruption — what the artist himself calls a vivid dream of Mexican society. With Vultures & Fireflies, he transforms the most unique chapters of local history into part of a global story.

“I created a type of personal collage. Vultures & Fireflies represents countless of hours of work, a deep honesty, and a strong sense of humanity. This chronicle features a series of large-scale drawings and paintings, installations, videos, and sculptures. It celebrates various visual resources taken from everyday life and the recent memories of the outskirts of Mexico City.” Alejandro Galván

Curated by Tonatiuh López & Laura Martínez.

More information at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture.

Vultures & Firelies, solo exhibition by Alejandro Galván, Marres, House for Contemporary Cultures, Maastricht, NL, 2025. Images by Gert-Jan van Rooij.

Opening Thursday February 20th from 5 - 8 pm

No Man’s Art Gallery is pleased to announce Alan Hernández’s participation in the first edition of the Design Biennale Rotterdam 2025, at Huidenclub from 20 February - 2 March 2025.

Please find further informations here.

We are honoured to announce that Afra Eisma opens her first institutional solo exhibition Hush at the ICA San Diego, USA in 2025.

Further information to follow here.

Photos courtesy of ICA San Diego, USA

We are delighted to announce that RojoNegro has been selected to be a part of The Stuart Collection’s Emerging Artists Commissioning Program anticipated between spring 2025 and fall 2026.

Further information to follow here.

We are honoured to share that Afra Eisma will be participating in a group show at La Kunsthalle, Centre d’Art Contemporain Mulhouse, Se faire plaisir.

Find more information here.

We are thrilled to share that Alan Hernández is participating in this year’s edition of Salón Acme.

Find more information here.

We wholeheartedly congratulate Marilyn Sonneveld who has been nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting 2025, which marks her second nomination for this prestigious award.

Her work will be on show in the Royal Palace of Amsterdam from February 1st - March 31st.
More information: Royal Palace Amsterdam

online catalogue

Art Antwerp
Booth A30
12 - 15 December 2024

Mia Chaplin
Jamal Nxedlana
Maxim Santalov
Marilyn Sonneveld

NMAG’s participation at Art Antwerp is supported by Mondriaan Fonds.

online catalogue

Untitled Art Fair
Booth A22
4 - 8 December 2024

Alan Hernández
Sam Samiee

NMAG’s participation at Untitled Miami Beach is supported by Mondriaan Fonds.

From 23 November 2024 to 4 May 2025, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam will be showcasing I Hit You With a Flower – sugar-coated art with a punch, an eye-catchingly sweet exhibition that celebrates diversity in society. It is also a tribute to ‘girly art’, a term that has often been used as a derogatory label but is now being reclaimed as a badge of honour.

Alan Hernández, Alex Naber & ChelseaBoy, Anna Aagaard Jensen (en met Micheline Nahra), Araks Sahakyan, Béatrice Lussol, Dae Uk Kim, Ellande Jaureguiberry, Frances Goodman, Jakob Lena Knebl, Jurjen Galema, Kinke Kooi, Lily van der Stokker, Lucile Boiron, Mari Katayama, Marijke Vasey, Mona Cara, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy, Pipilotti Rist, Richard Otparlic & Lucas Tortolano, Rory Pilgrim, Sarah Tritz, Vera Gulikers and Zoe Williams. Curated by Nanda Janssen.

More information at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam

Press:

‘Ancestors, neighbours, myths and religion’, an interview of Alejandro Galván by Kiki Mertens for Metropolis M, 2025

Alejandro Galván has been invited to participate in a residency at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, starting at the beginning of November 2024, followed by his first solo exhibition Vultures and Fireflies open June 28th 2025.

More information: Marres, House for Contemporary Culture

Photos by Gert Jan van Rooij

Join a performance by Benjamin Francis at The Luther Museum, once a Lutheran hospice for the elderly, women and orphans. The Spirit of Amsterdam is an evening in which several young creators depict the genius loci, or spirit of the former nursing home. An evening of theater, music and visual art.

More information at: Luther Museum

Afra Eisma will participate in a group exhibition, The New Mother Sculptures, at Museum Cobra in Amstelveen, NL.

“The New Mother Sculptures is a large, mysterious contemporary sculpture exhibition, specially organized by artist Ad de Jong. The upper room of the museum transforms into one open space with 40 contemporary sculptures by Dutch artists on a specially laid clay floor and with a soundscape.”

Find more information here.

Press:
- Painting is alive and kicking, Edo Dijksterhuis in het Parool, 2024
- The Royal Painting Prize of 2024, Anna van Leeuwen, de Volkskrant, 2024

Tobias Thaens (Eindhoven, NL, 1999) is one of the three winners of the Royal Award for Painting 2024. Alongside the three winners, are the nominees, which includes Marilyn Sonneveld (1990, NL). The exhibition can be visited until November 10th in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. More information: Royal Prize for Painting 2024

From 6 October 2024 to 4 December 2024, the Revuelta Galería presents Lx Montañx no tiene género, a curatorial project as part of Design Week Mexico 2024. Drawing from the complexities of nature and existence itself, this exhibition invites its audience to challenge human societal norms by questioning notions of order and categorisation, thus examining gender and identity.

Alan Hernández, Andrés Gutierrez, Daach, Daniel Adolfo, Daniel Berman, Inari Reséndiz, Lordag & Sondag, Rosita Relámpago, Tamar Gaon, Yocomos.

Curated by Gustavo García Murrieta.

More information at Revuelta Galería.