15 September 2026

WE SEE IN PARTS

Sizani Baloyi

Oovookoo Gallery
15 Hulbert Road, New Centre, Johannesburg
19 September – 3 October 2026

Oovookoo Gallery is pleased to present We See in Parts, a solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based visual artist Sizani Baloyi (b. 1994, Giyani, Limpopo).

This exhibition marks Baloyi’s third solo presentation, following his debut solo exhibition, Like Birds in the Cornfield, in 2025.

Working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, Baloyi has developed a practice deeply rooted in observation, lived experience, and the social realities of contemporary South Africa. His work draws particular attention to the lives of people living on the margins, reflecting on inequality, resilience, uncertainty, aspiration, and the persistent human capacity to hope.

Born in Giyani, Limpopo, Baloyi moved to Johannesburg in 2001 and currently lives and works within a small informal settlement community in Soweto. His relationship with art began at an early age. While attending Clip Valley Primary School, he won an art competition that resulted in his school receiving its first computer. At PJ Simelane Secondary School, he continued to develop his talent, excelling in Visual Arts and graduating in 2014 as one of the school’s top-performing students in the subject.

In 2015, Baloyi enrolled at Artist Proof Studio, where he trained as a professional printmaker, graduating in 2018 after four years of study. His early career was marked by significant recognition, including winning the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce Art Competition in 2017. Following his graduation, he further expanded his experience through an internship with acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge.

Baloyi’s practice has continued to gain recognition through exhibitions, collaborations, and professional opportunities. In 2020, his work was featured by Design Indaba in its Master of Art coverage, followed by his participation in the Turbine Art Fair Unearthed programme in 2021. He has since exhibited extensively in group exhibitions and worked with a range of galleries and art institutions as an associate artist.

With We See in Parts, Baloyi turns his attention inward and outward at once, exploring the fragile space between dreaming and uncertainty.

We all carry visions of the future. We imagine different lives, greater opportunities, stability, fulfilment, and possibilities beyond the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Yet a dream rarely arrives as a complete picture. More often, we see it in fragments: a glimpse of where we want to go, without knowing precisely how we will get there. It is this incomplete vision that sits at the centre of the exhibition.

We See in Parts considers what it means to pursue something that cannot yet be fully seen. The destination may be imaginable, but the route remains uncertain. Obstacles emerge unexpectedly; plans change; failure and disappointment become part of the journey. The future exists somewhere between what we hope for and what we are able to perceive.

Baloyi’s fragmented imagery becomes a visual language for this condition. His compositions suggest that a life, much like a dream, is never experienced as one complete and uninterrupted narrative. Instead, it is assembled from individual moments: memories, relationships, struggles, failures, encounters, aspirations, and moments of hope. Each fragment carries its own meaning, but it is through their accumulation that a larger story begins to emerge.

This approach also resonates with Baloyi’s broader engagement with contemporary South African life. His work is informed by the realities of communities negotiating economic hardship and social inequality, but it does not reduce these experiences to narratives of deprivation. Instead, he makes space for complexity, for humour, ambition, vulnerability, dignity, and possibility. His subjects are not simply defined by their circumstances; they are people who continue to imagine, adapt, endure, and dream.

In this sense, dreaming becomes an act of resilience. To dream when the evidence around you appears to suggest otherwise is an act of courage. It is a refusal to allow the present moment to determine the limits of the future. For those living within conditions of uncertainty, the ability to imagine something beyond the immediate reality can itself become a form of resistance.

We See in Parts does not promise certainty. Instead, it acknowledges that uncertainty is inseparable from the act of moving forward. We may not know how large a dream will become, how many obstacles stand in its way, or where its pursuit will ultimately lead. What we have is the next fragment  the next possibility, the next decision, the next step.

The exhibition therefore asks us to reconsider what it means to see. Perhaps seeing does not require having the entire picture. Perhaps it is enough to recognise a possibility and move towards it, even when much of the path remains hidden.

Through his paintings, sculptures, and print-based sensibility, Baloyi constructs a world where fragments become meaningful, where uncertainty coexists with hope, and where the incomplete is not necessarily a failure but an invitation to continue.

We see in parts.

And sometimes, seeing only the next part is enough to keep moving towards the dream.

Written by Abongile Matintela