In Usha Seejarim’s Ophirton studio, on the outer edge of Joburg’s CBD where the city frays into industry before the more ordered rhythms of the suburbs take hold, domestic objects have slipped their everyday obligations. Brooms, pegs, irons and trays gather in multiples, recognisable before I understand what she’s asked them to become.
I take my time with a work before me, looking for something familiar that might lead me towards the artist and the practice behind it. Then, uncertainty creeps in. When is a peg simply a peg, and when have repetition, scale, and context made it something else entirely? It’s in that hesitation that I’ve reached too quickly for the art world’s familiar shorthand, a way of making an uncertain encounter feel more legible.
Emerging. Mid-career. Established.
For a long time, those words helped steady the encounter. The longer I’ve lived around art, though, the less comfortably I sit with the neatness they impose on lives that rarely unfold that way. Here, even the familiar won’t stay neatly in place.
Seejarim begins with things we’ve already learnt how to read. A broom, an iron, a peg. Their domestic purpose is obvious, but so are the expectations of women’s labour carried within them. “There’s a layer of that concept that’s done,” she tells me. The materials arrive already speaking.
What shifts isn’t the peg but my relation to it. Its usefulness remains intact, but not its innocence. Seejarim lets the object carry me towards the politics rather than announcing them at the door. Her artworks, she says, are a way of “calling people in”.
Seejarim’s generosity lies in refusing the assumption that access requires simplification. The peg lets me enter because I already know it; what she does with that recognition makes the familiar harder to dismiss.
When the label slips
Calling Seejarim established should be easy. Three decades of work, major commissions at home and abroad, an international exhibition history seem to settle it.
“Established means you’ve arrived,” she says. But the finality bothers her. So does what the word can conceal. I had quietly allowed artistic recognition to stand in for financial security. Seejarim describes how far those two can drift apart. An MBA followed, partly to understand that disconnect.
She now speaks about “having agency of my own career”, making before a gallery asks, thinking ahead rather than waiting for permission. That same willingness to choose what comes next makes her participation in the Contra.Joburg arts festival interesting. On August 29-30, the city-wide visual arts experience will move audiences through studios and creative spaces across Joburg. Seejarim will open her Ophirton studio on the Sunday, allowing strangers into the place where her work takes shape.
She calls it “a comfortable vulnerable”. The phrase complicates the idea of arrival. Three decades of practice have not removed exposure from the work; they have made her more deliberate about which forms of it she is prepared to choose.
That refusal to become settled finds a different expression in Bev Butkow’s woven practice. Structure matters to her, but so does knowing when to loosen control and allow play into the work. In 2024, she made 70 applications to open calls. Each required her to articulate her practice through writing and portfolios. Almost all were unsuccessful, but the repetition sharpened her understanding of what she was making. The final application led to Fire my Spirit, her large installation in the brutalist foyer of the Keorapetse William Kgositsile Theatre at the University of Johannesburg.
Yet despite international exhibitions and a major institutional commission, Butkow still describes herself as “right at the very beginning”. When someone recently told her he’d work a lifetime to build a comparable CV, she was moved.
Joburg is part of that movement. From her inner-city studio, Butkow describes wanting to remain “a citizen of the city”, close to its streets and the lives being made there. Contra brings that relationship into view. The work we encounter across the weekend isn’t just being shown in Joburg. Much of it has been formed through sustained, intimate relationships with the city itself.
Emerging again
Elsewhere in the inner city, at August House, Melissa Haiden makes one of those labels useful again. She’s been painting for around 20 years and is preparing for her first solo exhibition in November — she calls herself “emerging”. When I ask her what she means by that, she doesn’t describe a rung on a career ladder. She describes movement.
“I hope I’m always an emerging artist,” she says. Emerging, in this sense, has less to do with rank than with evolution, with her practice continuing to advance without needing to announce its arrival.
Her paintings make that evolution visible. She once painted Joburg directly, its rubbish and cracks entering the work. Nature now carries more of what she wants to say, although the city hasn’t vanished so much as moved inward. Flowers can hold what a figure once stated openly. “I want to paint what I’m hiding,” she says.
The first solo should mark advancement. But Haiden complicates that chronology. Twenty years of painting can lead to a first solo and still feel like emergence.
Where the label belongs
Sara Hallatt offers the categories a narrower life. Contra’s founder sees the organisation working behind the scenes, helping curators and galleries think about what an artist’s career may need next. An artist building visibility needs more places to show the work; further into a career, where and with whom it appears can matter more.
The labels shape a career without helping us understand the life inside it. Joburg is already full of artists at work. Contra brings those separate careers into our line of sight at once. Works sit metres apart while the careers behind them have travelled different routes.
For Seejarim, Butkow and Haiden, Joburg is more than the place where work is shown. It’s shaped where and how the practice has developed. That’s where Contra finds common ground with Jozi My Jozi, a sponsor of this year’s festival. Dawn Robertson, its creative economy catalyst, speaks of inner-city renewal as something built through connected interventions rather than isolated beautification. Contra approaches that work through art, drawing people into studios, onto streets and through parts of Joburg they’d otherwise pass by.
Seen together, the chronology begins to fail. Reputation keeps one time. Money another. Confidence may arrive after recognition. An artist can receive a major commission and still feel at the beginning; another can work for decades and choose to remain emerging.
The art world gives those lives a sequence. The artists keep disturbing it.
My mind goes back to Seejarim’s studio, to those ordinary objects and my first hesitation before them. I’d wanted something that would make what I was seeing more legible. A peg could be a peg until it wasn’t. A label could locate an artist until it began concealing more than it revealed.
The next time I reach for the shorthand, I think I’ll stay with the work a little longer.
Contra.Joburg 2026 takes place on Saturday, August 29 and Sunday, August 30, from 10:00am to 5:00pm daily. For more information click here:
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