Ângela Ferreira traces unexpected connections between punk in 1970s London and apartheid South Africa, exploring how acts of resistance travel across time, place, architecture and sound.
18 June 2026
For more than three decades, Ângela Ferreira has examined the political lives of architecture, memory and cultural exchange, often revealing the hidden connections that shape historical narratives. In ‘Slits are Girls’, presented at The Showroom in London, the artist turns to punk as both subject and method. Beginning with photographs of the pioneering all-female punk band The Slits and extending to South Africa’s multiracial punk group National Wake, the exhibition maps a constellation of protest, gender politics, spatial histories and sonic resistance. Through sculpture, sound and archival research, Ferreira considers how rebellious energies move across geographies and generations, and what these histories might still offer the present. ART AFRICA spoke with the artist about political memory, the architecture of dissent and the enduring spirit of punk.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Your exhibition brings together the histories of punk in West London and apartheid-era South Africa. How do you hold the differences between these contexts without flattening their distinct political meanings?
Ângela Ferreira: The differences between the two contexts may seem unbridgeable, but there is a way to understand how they can be held together in this project about punk.
In the mid to late seventies, I was living in Cape Town, and I only knew of London through film, newspapers, music and a tourist visit. As we all know, colonial history created close links between South Africa and London. I knew enough to know that English politics were turbulent, the industrial workerist ethos was in the throes of being destroyed, the economy was collapsing, and English youth saw ‘no future’. Punk emerged from young people who felt they had nothing to lose by challenging the system. It transmitted a sense of profound rebellion against the system they found themselves living in. In some ways, it embodied the sound of protest.
I went to art school at UCT in 1978. A white, privileged girl recently arrived from Portugal/Mozambique. I was part of a mostly white, lively, and active group of music lovers and young connoisseurs – we listened to a lot of reggae (at the time, I just thought that made sense because we were in Africa). The UCT’s Michaelis library had a subscription to the NME (New Musical Express), and we spent a lot of time poring over the images and texts. We too felt angry with the political context of apartheid South Africa.
But it was difficult to find a way to channel our anger and frustration. There was, naturally, a somewhat derivative turn in the appropriation of the punk ethos in the South African context, but from my perspective, the punk movement’s drive against the system inspired young people like ourselves in South Africa. I read it as a political protest.
The Slits were the first punk women’s band, and for girls like me, they were doubly transgressive and emancipatory. They asserted themselves by insisting on a unique noise which asserted feminine confidence and creativity. They also adopted dub and reggae sounds in their music. They suffered ostracisation and censorship too. From where I stood, their stance was political.
So this project ‘Slits are Girls’ links that moment in London to the band that I believe played a parallel role in apartheid South Africa – National Wake – the first multiracial punk band, which defied apartheid. Simply due to their multiracial composition, each gig was an act of political transgression and a point made in challenging the system. In addition, it was never meant to be a nostalgic project, and that is why we move across time and space by showing the amazing video curated by the Cape Verdean contemporary punk musician Scúru Fitchádu, featuring contemporary punk bands appearing every day in South Africa. Also, there is a collaboration with The Black Industrial Research Group and Dubmorphology, a London sound project that performed new, adapted sounds inspired by The Slits.
This project is really about my curiosity around how political thought travels through space and time. It does not flatten distinct political meanings; it engages with political meaning and how it travels through time and geographies.
The project begins with photographs of The Slits but expands into sculpture and installation. What does it mean to translate a brief photographic moment into a spatial form that carries multiple timelines?
My practice has long been about allowing archive images, films, sounds, poems, buildings, and documents to be the first driving forces behind the various odd connections I tend to make between events and histories. I need to comment on my histories and make sense of them. As an artist, it is my way of understanding the world I have lived in and of going forward to create tools to untangle the present.
This project is naturally rooted in photographs and sound. A crucial moment in the process occurred when I was walking to The Showroom with curator Andrew Renton and realised I was in the space where much of the early punk action had taken place.
The opening image of the three ‘Slits’ girls sitting on the pavement in front of the graffiti-covered corrugated-iron wall really touched me and triggered a wave of empathy. Since reading architecture and space in cities is one of my favourite ways to interpret and comment on communities, histories, and politics, and since I am a foreigner in London, Andrew and I set out to find the exact spot where the photograph was taken. It was an intuitive exercise in rooting ourselves into the space and its memories. And simultaneously, an unexpected way to complement/complete my own old fascination with this all-girl band.
There is also the sculptural approach to my method. I love making objects that can frame ideas, and often these are born from architectural and spatial experiences. Strangely enough, the photograph in that spot, with the corrugated iron backdrop, could have been taken in Cape Town in the late seventies! Also, corrugated iron has been present in my work since the beginning (’Sites and Services’, 1992; ‘A Spontaneous Tour of Some Monuments of African Architecture’, 2021). So, the first sculpture for this project, ‘Slits Are Girls (Daventry Street)’, is my way of framing the exhibition and the history of The Slits in that locale – Daventry Street in London – and simultaneously recognising my own sculptural material language in it.
Strangely, the wattle-and-daub surface also carries multiple timelines. Directly drawn from my fascination with the famous and complex mud photographs of the girls on the cover of the album ‘Cut’, it speaks to my interest in architecture in general and to the more recent focus on traditional building methods. This is obviously rooted in Africa.
By linking The Slits with National Wake, you highlight feminist and anti- apartheid energies within punk. How do you think about gender across these overlapping histories, especially in relation to the exhibition’s title?
Almost unconsciously, The Slits were role model feminists for me. They were never feminists in the pamphleteering type of way. The Slits were acting in a liberated, feminist, without-using-the-feminist-label kind of way. They were just asserting themselves as women. Occupying the space that they had the right to, without the need to articulate the theory. By the time they formed as a band, feminist theory was well established and disseminated, but they were not into theory. Despite their looks and stances provoking attacks and abuse from others, they just were. They claimed their space as women. That’s it!
The word ‘slits’ was chosen by them very consciously with reference to the vagina and therefore clearly positioning themselves as women in a mostly punk world of men. It’s provocative and in-your-face punk kind of language.
The show’s title clearly underscores the challenges of gender politics inherent in the band. It comes from the graffiti seen behind them in the photograph, which we believe they did, as mentioned earlier. Borrowing the sentence ‘Slits are Girls’ for the title makes the exhibition site-specific. The show is there, very close to where they rehearsed and lived. It repeats the band’s name and reinforces the gendered assertiveness. Protest was a way of existing for this band.
National Wake, on the other hand, is a band of 4 men, formed in the aftermath of the Soweto uprisings of 1976. There was not much gender politics in this formation, but a clear racial political statement. The issues of racial politics were much more urgent in South Africa at this time. Much more than gender politics. However, they were the band that defied apartheid by the nature of their composition – two white people and two black people. A complete challenge to the system just because they were. Each time they came onto a stage to play, they were breaking the country’s heinous rules and underlying injustices. Again, the courage of protest came from being themselves, asserting the space they had a right to but were denied by an unjust political system.
The interesting thing is to look at how the potential for attitudes of protest can have underlying overlapping similarities in different contexts across geographies.
Your work often explores how architecture reflects power. In this exhibition, how does the reconstruction of sites like the Athens Gardens estate function as both a record and a reimagining of history?
Yes, it is true that I frequently choose to ´read´ architecture as texts that inform us about complex societal structures. Buildings can be viewed as pictures pointing to politics, sociology, anthropology, aesthetics and sounds of a particular locale or space. The way I ‘read’ buildings is crucial to the critical approach in my work. They sometimes stand for some of the world’s paramount conflicts, which are still being played out. In this case, they can show us the spaces of protest and thereby teach us stuff about the energies of protesting. I am particularly interested in late modernist architecture: both of colonial rule in Africa and of the modernist drive in social housing in the Western world. You can see this in works like Maison Tropicale (2007) or the SAAL Brigades series (2014-2025).
The Athens Gardens estate plays an important role in this story. I believe that in the late 60s and early 70s, it was part of a rapidly changing urban landscape defined by post-war rebuilding – a series of concrete developments, aiming to replace older, damaged Victorian housing. At this time, it was a lively, bustling high-density housing area that sparked significant cultural shifts. It was characterised by a large number of squatters, including notable figures such as Joe Strummer and The 101ers. A mix of working-class neighbourhood and vibrant, emerging music scene. However, records indicate that similar estates in the immediate surrounding area were found to have structural or safety issues (such as asbestos) and were eventually demolished.
The buildings were economical, bland, formally dry and harsh – beautiful and ugly at the same time – which probably created the perfect atmosphere for rebellion of the youth that inhabited these spaces. The Slits marked their space on one of the walkways between buildings by writing their signature as graffiti. And the image of this walkway at Athens Gardens, featured on the vinyl record that appears in the exhibition, remains with us. The buildings and the band are united here.
The sculpture that reconstructs the Athens Gardens estate, The Slits (Harrow Road), is the largest and yet the most invisible sculpture in the exhibition. It integrates into The Showroom’s architecture as if it belongs there and has always been part of the original building. It is difficult to see it as a stand-alone sculpture until you notice the vinyl record cover on the wall. Since the original Athens Gardens buildings have been torn down, my work brings them to life through a strategy that aims to frame the memory of punk within the city’s geography and its social architecture, prevalent in the late modernist history of the city. I am rebuilding the spaces where the action happened. One can liken that to a monument if you wish. It’s a monument to the city’s very history and a reminder of the poor living conditions it endured. The same architecture that gave rise to the anger which the bands stood for. This is the architecture of ‘no future’. It is both a criticism of the architecture and a homage to its history.
The National Wake sculpture (Hermanus) similarly points to the space of performance. In this case, an out-of-the-way farm near a small coastal town in the vicinity of Cape Town, where the band played inside wooden structures. Playing out of sight of the police was also a strategy.
The exhibition develops through collaboration and remains open-ended. How does this approach challenge traditional exhibition formats, and what new forms of knowledge can emerge from it?
Collaboration and open-endedness have become very important factors in the methodology of my work. They are both beautiful principles that guide my practice. I would like to start by clarifying that I am not referring to participatory artworks. By keeping the installation as an open working space, I am creating a way to extend my practice with new inputs that complement it and enrich it.
Sometime in the earlier days of my practice, I realised that music had enviable qualities. I gathered that sound enters the brain directly with little interference. But mostly I was amazed at how it fulfilled so many of my ambitions as a contemporary artist. It could be formally and aesthetically super sophisticated while still transmitting strong political messages. I was rather jealous of musicians! So, this led me to introduce sound into my work. Firstly, by using recorded sound (poetry and songs) and then soon afterwards by inviting sound people to collaborate in the making of the works, to complete the works and share the burden of the responsibility of the message. To make much more nuanced and complex works such as Wattle and Daub (2006), Entrer dans la Mine (2013), and Experimental Field (2024).
As part of my commitment to share the Slits are Girls installation, I invited the Black Industrial Research Group to intervene throughout the exhibition. Building on Dubmorphology’s performance on the opening night, the Research Group has developed an evolving intervention that draws on punk and its entanglements with multiple political and cultural histories. This expanded field of research and critique montages sound and visual elements, projected onto one of the sculptural forms within the installation. This ongoing generative and semi-autonomous system is intended as a non-conforming, punk montage machine that suggests connections between artistic and political projects in the UK and South Africa.
In the same collaborative spirit, I invited my friend and musician Scúru Fitchádu to curate a playlist of historic and contemporary punk from South Africa. It includes original footage of National Wake and Wild Youth, as well as young bands like 21 Children and Shameless. An invigorating experience of South African punk today. I am really thrilled with these collaborations. The work is so much more complete with them, and our knowledge building should always be done this way.
Punk is treated here as an ongoing practice rather than a moment in the past. How do you see its spirit being activated today, across different political and cultural contexts?
I can only say that this project encouraged me to look at punk manifestations much further afield. Years ago, when I first became interested in this kind of youth expression, I was curious about whether and how punk had crossed frontiers of the Iron Curtain. I was not too surprised to learn that there were venues in East Berlin in the 70s and 80s, for example, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course, more recently, we all know about Pussy Riot challenging the system in Russia after the Soviet Union. Now, I was surprised to find it has taken deep roots in places that were very unexpected for me. I am thinking of Turkey, Lebanon and various other places in the Middle East like Dubai. Even in China today, the scene remains active, with notable acts focusing on themes of social change, working-class life, and political dissent.
But then, if you think about it, it is the sound of protest, and it is the sound of some societal anger. So, throughout the globe, where youth need to challenge the system… to show how they are anti-establishment, to rebel…. it naturally appears. The spirit of punk is very alive today; in fact, I believe it has gained further traction amongst the youth, given current global political conditions! And for good reason. It is a raw expression of political unhappiness. It is a harsh form of pure protest, so it is very pertinent today. I love to see and hear the Soweto bands playing in the streets and backyards, amongst the family’s daily goings-on and very young children running around.
Sound plays an important role in the exhibition. How do sonic elements extend or complicate your sculptural practice?
As I explained before, sound was introduced into the artworks and the processes thereof to complement three-dimensional components. It also has its origins in my reference material, a lot of which is sound. For example, over the years, I have made works that begin with audio research, such as the series of Talk Towers, 2011-2026, all of which draw on audio archive material.
My intention was to pay homage to remarkable people like Miriam Makeba or Angela Davis, who have played a role in developing a broader approach to the idea of revolution. Also, in works like Cena Aberta, 2010, the radio play in which Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso plays the part of a slave transported on a slave ship, or Radio Voz da Liberdade, 2022, which tells the story of an African radio station that helps liberate a European country. Sometimes the sound component includes a performance moment, like in the work Slits are Girls. Using sound and performance as an extension of the material in the works is a natural way to complement and complete their meaning.
Your work engages with histories of resistance and their afterlives. In this exhibition, how do you balance paying tribute with maintaining a critical perspective on these histories?
It is important to understand that my take on the histories of resistance is shaped by the fact that these histories have often been overlooked and, until more recently, remained obscured. Particularly when one is talking about details. These histories of resistance are filled with so-called minor details which are inspiring as prototypes for how we should be thinking of resistance today. It is often these details that inspire me.
On the other hand, as you suggest, these histories are also crowded with failures, horrors, corruption, and so on. I know about these, and obviously, I am hugely critical and saddened by them. I have them in mind when I am working. I could make works about present issues of racism, human rights offences or corruption. And indirectly, my work points to all of this. But what really interests me are the inspiring positive details which have often been overlooked. There is a kind of constructive nostalgia (I hope) in the works, which points to the potential glory of these incredible moments of resistance but inevitably reminds us of the failures which we must live with in the present. They are about a lost opportunity to have built on those principles of resistance.
Not having paid enough attention to understand what was important to carry on as we moved forward. I think the works should be seen as a way of calling for the reconsideration of some of the original and inspiring histories of resistance which have dissipated in their afterlives.
The afterlife of these histories is where we live now. I guess I am requesting that my viewer spend a moment longer in the histories of resistance that are worth taking forward to begin to understand how the air can be cleared in the now.
This exhibition was on view at The Showroom in London from 27 February until 7 June 2026
