On the 29th of August,The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum will open an exhibition titled: Unseen, in celebration of women’s month. 

The Museum invites visitors to join in making short videos talking about people they know, people in society or important issues that you feel are unseen. The videos will end with the words, "unseen” now "seen”. 

The exhibition opens in conjunction with the Nelson Mandela Bay University exhibition opening at the Bird Street Gallery, titled Unseen Together featuring the work of Micaela Scholtz, Mieke Janse van Rensburg and Amberleigh du Plessis. The exhibition is a visual exploration of Illness and Disability and opens on 24th August 2026. 

 

Unseen, at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum is curated by Sive Xelo. She was part of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s unemployment program. A program designed to provide experience for Graduates within the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. 

Xelo curated the exhibition from artworks in the permanent collection of the Art Museum and designed the exhibition to shine a light on artists, stories, and creative practices that are undervalued and underrepresented in society. The exhibition celebrates women artists, emerging artists, and other underrepresented creatives whose contributions have been overlooked despite their artistic significance.

Visitors are encouraged to discover the people, places, and stories that have received less attention. 

 The message of the show is, "We see you, we’ve been seeing you, but we forgot to celebrate you”

The exhibition includes paintings; photographic portraits; landscapes, video work and three-dimensional work such as ceramics. At the center of the exhibition hangs an empty frame to encourage visitors to think of someone in their lives that is unseen but deserves to be seen.

Rather than asking visitors simply to view artworks, the exhibition will encourage them to celebrate these artists, and look for people in their own lives, who are overlooked and celebrate them, by saying "Unseen now Seen”.