For years, South Africa's contemporary art world has largely moved in one direction. Artists leave the towns and villages that shaped them, hoping to find opportunities in Johannesburg or Cape Town where galleries, collectors and institutions determine much of the country's artistic economy.
It is a journey that has become so familiar that it is rarely questioned. But artist and founder of The Dealr Muofhe Manavhela believes the time has come to ask a different question: What happens when the movement is reversed?
"For the past three years, I've been thinking about the movement of art away from the places where its knowledge is formed," she says. "What travels with the artwork and what remains?"
The questions have evolved into Towards the Art: Venda 2026, a five-day programme from 23 to 27 September, which invites artists, curators, writers and cultural travellers to leave the familiar art capitals and spend time in Venda, meeting artists in their environments and engaging with the landscapes and histories that shape their practices. The programme asks participants to slow down and consider what changes when art is encountered before it reaches a gallery wall.
For Manavhela, the idea is personal. Although she was raised in Johannesburg, she was born in Venda and considers it home. Through her grandfather she was introduced to celebrated potter Vho Rebecca Matibe, a meeting that would reshape her understanding of what an artistic practice can be.
Around 2024 Manavhela returned to Venda with a simple request.
"I asked her to teach me," she says, "I was just a curious artist."
She spent almost a month learning alongside Matibe, who is now in her 90s, making pottery during the day while listening to stories that stretched across generations. The conversations became as important as the technical lessons. "She reminisces a lot about the 1980s and the 1990s, when the government was proactive in getting artists out of Venda and into exhibitions. She's well travelled. The conversations opened my eyes to the fact that Venda has a rich art culture but many of its artists are disconnected from the rest of the art world."
The experience changed the way Manavhela thought about her own practice and the wider South African art ecosystem. Every visit home became an opportunity to meet another master artist, to listen, learn and slowly build relationships with practitioners whose names are rarely part of mainstream conversations.
"I built a very big repertoire of masters in Venda," she says. "Then I realised it wasn't enough for me to hold all that information on my own, especially because I wasn't doing anything with it. I was just learning."
That realisation eventually led to the creation of The Dealr. Originally conceived as a marketplace where independent artists could sell their own work, it has evolved into a platform that develops projects around artists, helping expand their reach through exhibitions, residencies and international opportunities.
"We take an artist from where they are and try to expand their reach using the resources that we have access to." The philosophy has seen The Dealr work across KwaZulu-Natal and at Art Basel, where an artist Manavhela discovered on TikTok became the platform's best-selling artist during the fair.
But it is Venda that has remained at the centre of her thinking.
Earlier this year, with support from the National Arts Council, The Dealr brought six contemporary artists from across South Africa to Venda for a week-long residency, where they met six master artists, travelled to Mapungubwe, collected natural materials and spent time in conversations that crossed generations and artistic disciplines.
The residency became the foundation for Towards the Art.
"What we wanted was cross-generational and cross-cultural conversations, she says, "We wanted contemporary artists to spend time with the masters and understand where their practices come from."
The experience also challenged assumptions many younger artists held about where meaningful artistic careers can be built.
"A lot of the artists were asking the masters how they managed to work from so far away. When we came back, a lot of them reflected that maybe they could actually afford to work from home instead of always feeling they had to move to Johannesburg or Cape Town."
She believes the expectation that artists must relocate to major cities has become one of the industry's least examined assumptions.
"Johannesburg and Cape Town work. They have good infrastructure, galleries, institutions and art fairs and we absolutely need those spaces," she says. "But I don't think artists should feel pressured to come here in order to build themselves."
For her, artistic practice is inseparable from environment.
"The city isn't always sensitive," she says. "An artistic practice is very sensitive and sometimes you need to remove yourself from that environment in order to create."
The sensitivity extends beyond studio practice to questions of geography. "One of the biggest conversations is about land," she says. "Land, geography and what that lends to art and context."
She explains that geography shapes artists in ways that often go unnoticed until they leave home.
"We become desensitised to what land does to the psyche and to the creative process," she says. "Hearing the highway every day or not hearing birds anymore, those things shape the way we think."
Rather than simply transporting artworks into cities, she wants audiences to understand the environments from which the works emerge.
"I hope people start asking what it means to go towards context," she says. "To understand the artwork you're going to see in a gallery by first seeing it in the artist's studio."
The emotional shifts that accompany moving between landscapes have become central to the project's philosophy. Beyond the philosophical questions, however, the project is equally concerned with rebuilding local creative economies.
Tourism to Venda declined sharply after the Covid-19 pandemic, reducing opportunities for artists who once relied on visitors purchasing work from their studios.
"A lot of the masters are yearning for people to come to them," Manavhela says. "I would really love for people to go there because it would make the community very happy and it would also boost the local arts economy."
Ultimately, however, success will be measured less by attendance numbers than by the tangible impact the project has on artists' lives. "If artists tell me that people came, bought sculptures and now they're not so stressed anymore, then that's success. My biggest goal has always been to put money into artists' pockets."
Her longer-term ambition reaches beyond exhibitions and sales.
"I would love to see a local art economy in Venda. A gallery that sells artists' work, employs local people and becomes a hub that connects visitors with artists across the province."
For Manavhela, the vision represents something larger than a single event. It is an attempt to rethink where South Africa's art world locates value, knowledge and opportunity, while reminding audiences that some of the country's richest artistic traditions have never disappeared. They have simply been waiting for people to make the journey back towards them.