What does it mean to listen to a mark? To sense a drawing not only through the eye, but through the body, through breath, through memory? This exhibition brings together seven artists whose works are dense, quiet, and deliberate – not always legible, but deeply resonant. They engage drawing not merely as a technique, but as a way of being with the world: a practice of return and repair, while foregrounding the ethics of opacity and resistance.

Taking inspiration from Tina M. Campt’s concept of “listening to images”, the exhibition considers how marks -  on paper, in space, across skin or history -  might carry the frequencies of lives lived otherwise. Campt invites us to listen for the whispered, the withheld. Likewise, these artists trace what has been silenced or fractured - not to resolve it, but to hold space for its presence. Drawing becomes, in their hands, an act of ritual. Through layered mark-making, repetition, and speculative mapping, they offer paper not as passive support, but as active witness – to intimacy, erasure, migration, grief, and endurance.

From Yonela Makoba’s pulp-dyed tapestries of feminised ritual, to Thato Makatu’s cardboard kitchen as a cartography of domestic memory; from Bella Knemeyer’s ghosted rubblescapes and urban detritus to Morné Visagie’s wave-like accumulations of graphite, echoing queerness, loss, and the sea - each work moves like a frequency, sometimes low and rumbling, sometimes soft and tactile.

Gareth Nyandoro’s incised surfaces vibrate with masculine precarity and movement - the invisible lines of migrancy, gig work, and risk - while Chuma Adam’s abstractions shimmer with refusal: the refusal to be known too easily, to be captured or decoded. Mia Thom's Listening Drawing series, each made up of 7 hours in layers of listening, respond to ambient sounds as a practice of direct attention; Marsi van de Heuvel’s chalk on blackboard works, meanwhile, comment on erasure, where fading becomes a gesture of belonging; a quiet meditation on place, inheritance, and the complexity of return.

Here, drawing becomes a means of making memory tactile. A way of marking out experimental terrain. A map made of spoor, of rumour, of lineage. The surface holds what cannot be said - a repeated refrain, a kitchen conversation, a silted echo of rubble, a line returning to itself.

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“To attend to the quiet is to attune oneself to frequencies of the otherwise.”

– Listening to Images