At the 2026 RMB Latitudes Art Fair in Johannesburg, ReCurate isn’t just exhibiting art, it’s exporting Botswana’s emotional memory, cultural complexity, and creative future to the continental stage
GOSEGO MOTSUMI
There’s a quiet revolution leaving Botswana for Johannesburg this month and it’s wrapped in acrylic paint, beadwork, memory, and migration.
For the third consecutive year, ReCurate will step into the spotlight at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair happening from 22-24 May 2026, carrying with it a trio of Batswana artists whose work feels less like decoration and more like emotional archaeology.
“As a curatorial entity dedicated to the promotion of Batswana artists, ReCurate’s participation at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2026 highlights the growing influence of the region’s creative voices within the broader African art market,” said founder of ReCurate, Renée Eisen-Khonat in a statement.
“This milestone underscores the agency’s core mission to act as a principal private promoter of Botswana’s talent on the international stage by providing the structured guidance, professional mentorship, and strategic market access necessary to navigate the global contemporary landscape.”
The exhibition, Presence, Pattern and Place, brings together Naledi Maifala, Neo Matome, and Oteng Keabetswe, three artists wrestling with time, identity, and the strange business of becoming human in a rapidly shifting Southern Africa.
ART THAT REMEMBERS
The presentation is highlighted by a dedicated solo booth for Maifala, winner of the 2025 ANNA Award, who arrives with Now Is Enough, a deeply personal meditation on presence and impermanence. Her paintings, inspired by family photo albums and rural childhood memories, freeze fleeting joy before it disappears.
Children chase goats. A nephew imagines himself Superman. Ordinary moments suddenly become sacred.
BEADS, POWER, AND HISTORY
Then comes Matome, one of Botswana’s most influential contemporary artists whose bodies of work, Bead Story explores the significant role beads play in the cultures of the African continent as signifiers in rites of passage, social status and wealth, ethnic identity, spirituality, protection and healing
Beads become symbols of status, spirituality, womanhood, healing, and survival. But Matome also digs into their darker history as currency during the transatlantic slave trade, forcing viewers to confront how beauty and violence often coexist.
Her work doesn’t sit politely on gallery walls. It interrogates power.
By examining the shift from the symbolic to the aesthetic, Matome highlights that culture is not static, questioning how these ancient material markers continue to shape and reflect contemporary social values.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOVING
Meanwhile, Keabetswe’s The Journey Before Arrival explores migration not as geography, but as emotion. His geometric compositions capture the silent anxiety between leaving and arriving, the internal migration that happens long before the physical one.
Together, these artists signal something bigger than an exhibition.
“The exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on the markers—both tangible and intangible—that we carry as we move through the world, exploring how we remember where we have been and how we imagine who we are becoming.”