Join us for a little show, a group presentation of small works, opening on Thursday, 6 August, from 16h00 at SMAC Gallery, 25 Church Street, Cape Town.

a little show  will be on view at SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, from Thursday, 30 July, and runs in conjunction with the 2026 Heat Festival.

A Little Show embraces modesty – not as a lack of ambition but as a deliberate curatorial position. It suggests that small gestures, quiet moments, and delicately considered works can accumulate into something meaningful, even powerful. Rather than make grand statements the exhibition proposes that attention to the intimate and the overlooked can reveal a much larger picture.

The premise for this assembly of smaller scale artworks comes from the desire to understand, and even to give in to, the urge to scale down, to pause, to step away from the massive and the gigantic, not just in art and architecture, but in wider experiences of everyday life, in local and international politics, in our relationship with the natural world.

The sense of impending disaster and the experiences of real ones that so many of humanity face now, call for the retreat to the inner world, to that, which is essential, comforting and trustworthy, to something that holds true value irrespective of size and material. Living in historical times has always come at a cost – grand historical narratives do not spare “the little man”, destroying his accumulations of worldly goods, status and claims to consequence. Amassed riches evaporate, grand palaces and gigantic monuments turn to ruble, priceless art collections get looted or destroyed. What we choose to save in those moments is what matters and can often fit in the palm of one’s hand or in one’s pocket – a photograph, a small object, a memento of life lived and cherished. What we hold dearest becomes a feeling, a memory, a story to preserve and pass on.

In his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), British ceramicist Edmund De Waal tells the story of his Jewish family through their collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures, which were saved from the 1938 looting by the Nazis and became the uniting thread holding the narrative together and the family connected through many years of historical and geographical dispersal. The small intricately carved objects were made to be held, played with and, in the book as well as in real life, become the symbol of memory and connection rather than loss and distance. They are “small, quick, ivory stories”.

Miniatures and small scale artworks included in this exhibition, whether sculptures or paintings, invite close looking and handling, establishing a level of intimacy and trust between the artist and the viewer. They evoke a sense of nostalgia, an ephemeral link to one’s own story or to idealized past held in objects and memory.

Louisa Cachalia and Marlene Steyn continue to explore the complexities of their subjects’ inner worlds while successfully balancing the economy of means that the smaller format demands of them. The sense of intimacy is heightened through close looking and so is the feeling of reward for following the artists into labyrinths of their imagination.

Working with found objects like medical pills or everyday materials like thread and fiber Leila Abrahams and Sundus Saad use abstraction as a seemingly dispassionate access point into worlds that speak of pain, survival and connection across generations and divides. The complexity of human experience rendered on minute scale brings home the poignancy of our vulnerability and resilience.

The coming together of the complex and layered atmospheric backgrounds and the hard intervening strikes in Nicholas Hales’ artworks carries an emotional charge that extends far beyond the small frame holding them. Frans Thoka’s use of Basotho blanket as the base medium in some of his pieces continues the conversation about the poetic materiality of everyday life that is infused with deep cultural significance. Drawing on his heritage his work questions value systems through profiling humble objects and stories that carry the wisdom of generations, while powerfully pointing to bigger questions and histories of strife, land dispossession and displacement that continue to shape South Africa’s present.

Storytelling is also at the heart of Nina Tor’s presentation – the soft power of her subjects is accumulative as is the simple wisdom offered in her titles. We are invited to imagine the worlds her characters come from and to believe, again, that small can be powerful and that the humble good will triumph over the ostentatious evil.

In fact, storytelling is what comes through in all the bodies of work presented in this little show. Perhaps, we find that telling stories creates a space for intimacy and connection between us, where meaning emerges not just from what is explicitly said, but from the little spaces in-between, and from the shared emotional space on the margins of the verbal and the visible. It is a little conversation that lives warmly in your memory for a long time.