There is a way that memory circulates before it settles. It moves through people in fragments, in gestures, in images half-held and half-recalled. It gathers slowly, carried between voices, before it takes form. It is within this register that the Standard Bank Art Lab presents Rumours /2026 by Santu Mofokeng.

Rumours /2026, co-curated by Lunetta Bartz on behalf of the Santu Mofokeng Foundation, brings together three bodies of work drawn from Mofokeng’s extended engagement with Bloemhof and its surrounding communities between 1988 and 1994. First shown in 1994 as Rumours / The Bloemhof Portfolio, this exhibition returns not as a fixed historical moment, but as something reactivated, repositioned for a present that continues to negotiate the conditions it reflects.

The title gestures toward the ways in which knowledge moves: laterally, informally, and often without resolution. It reflects Mofokeng’s own method, one grounded in proximity, in trust, in the time required to see without imposing. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a field of relations shaped by memory, labour, intimacy, and belief.

At the centre of the exhibition is The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, a body of work composed of studio portraits collected by Mofokeng over many years. Commissioned by Black working and middle-class families, these images exist outside of official archives. They were made for interiors, for private circulation, for the spaces where life is held rather than displayed. In gathering, retouching, and re-presenting them, Mofokeng does not claim authorship. Instead, he reframes them, asking what it means to encounter images that were never intended for public view, and what it means to look within an archive that resists containment.