Tracing memory, migration and resistance through Thero Makepe’s intimate photographic language.
26 May 2026
Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe turns the camera toward the emotional residue of history. Presented at Javett-UP, the exhibition unfolds as an expansive meditation on inheritance, exile and political memory, drawing together staged portraiture, archival imagery and documentary photography into a deeply personal yet regionally resonant narrative.
Centred on the intertwined histories of Botswana and South Africa, Makepe revisits the legacies of anti-apartheid struggle through the lives of his own family. The exhibition traces the movement of bodies across borders and generations, from his grandfather Hippolytus Mothopeng’s flight from apartheid South Africa to Botswana, to the enduring political shadow of PAC leader Zephaniah Mothopeng. Yet rather than presenting history as fixed or monumental, Makepe approaches it as something lived, fragmented and continuously reassembled.
Family members become collaborators in acts of remembrance, while music, activism and photography collapse into one another as forms of survival. Moving fluidly between past and present, ‘We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here’ asks how images might hold grief, tenderness and resilience at once, and what it means to inherit both freedom and its unfinished contradictions.
This exhibition is on view at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, until February 13, 2027.
