Day by Day ~ Exhibition Now Closed

Day-by-Day Ghetto is an exhibition about life in the ghetto as a daily negotiation of existence. While the ghetto is often depicted as a place of exclusion, it remains a space where people build their own systems to survive. It is within these spaces that dignity, income, and continuity are negotiated daily.

Mikiti’s “Zamcab” and Kata’s “Salaula” trace these structures through work, trade and circulation from improvised transport systems to transport goods across the city, to the global afterlife of second-hand clothing rebranded as “thrift”. The ghetto runs these systems daily, mirroring those of the middle class, but rebuilt through necessity by those who exist outside formal urban structures. What emerges is not a shadow economy but a parallel one visible, functioning, and largely misunderstood.

Kata and Mikiti approach this world from intersecting but distinct positions. Kata’s work is grounded in realistic representation - inviting the viewer to see the texture of experience lived without distance or abstraction. Mikiti, by contrast, works in silhouette: figures reduced to light and shadow, where truth is suggested rather than declared. Between them, a glimpse of ghetto life emerges one that is neither romanticised nor reduced.

While the word “compound” is used to depict similar spaces, conditions align. Ghettos are not only sites of exclusions, but spaces that generate their own systems, economies, and forms of continuity. The ghetto is not outside the system: it is the system itself, functioning in plain sight, day by day.

Text: Mary Zulu