MOMO Outskirts offers a unique, guided and exclusive art experience

Gallery MOMO in Joburg’s well-heeled Parktown North art hub is a well-recognised and respected contemporary gallery that has become a fixture of the city’s art scene. It is also noteworthy for being one of the only wholly black-owned gallery spaces in the entire country, helmed by gallerist and art entrepreneur Monna Mokoena. 

Now Mokoena has made an intriguing and innovative move in the local artworld. With partner Nisha Merit, they have opened MOMO Outskirts, a bespoke contemporary gallery and event space in the much sought-after Cradle Valley, the World Heritage site just outside greater Johannesburg. 

The space, which opened its doors for an invite-only private launch on the final day of the Art Joburg art fair a couple of weeks ago, is a stylishly converted farm building that has been fully restored and turned into a white cube space, with extended volumes, built from locally sourced stone and pleasingly resembling a redesigned rural church.

The architectural undertone is appropriate for their opening exhibition, a show which is partly commercial and partly museum-orientated, of the work of legendary Limpopo sculptor Jackson Hlungwani. Following on Hlungwani’s monumental retrospective at the Norval Foundation museum in Cape Town, this much more intimate show demonstrates his talent for finer and subtler smaller pieces, often totem-like and animistic. The work in this new venue recalls its original setting as devotional works in the religious shrine at Elim, and restoring Hlungwani’s work to a similarly rural landscape to his origins in rural Limpopo is a masterful curatorial strategy. 

"Part of our mission here at MOMO Outskirts is to offer our guests and clients a guided experience through what will usually be non-commercial programming — this is not to say that we won’t be exhibiting commercially, but we do want the space to be a bespoke and unique experience, one which we will keep fairly exclusive. The Hlungwani show expresses these qualities perfectly,” Merit says,

The venue has been over a decade in the making, and with the presence of the nearby Nirox Sculpture Park, as well a new lifestyle development in the pipeline to go along with the recently opened Farmhouse at 58 boutique hotel and the other existing attractions of the area, the Cradle Valley is fast becoming an important cultural corridor in the region. 

"Our goal was to offer a less commercial and more curated, multimedia experience in the Cradle,: says Mokoena. "To that end we’re programming a range of different events, brand activations and experiences, along with our art exhibition schedule. We do want to keep the experiences here more select and focused, however."

A particular area of interest for both Mokoena and Merit will be making the Outskirts events multimedia in nature — pairing food and music with a bespoke art experience, for example, or showcasing sound art, which demands deep listening and engagement much harder to achieve in the bustle and noise of the city. 

With its views from high up on the hillside overlooking a valley and farm dams, MOMO Outskirts seems perfectly placed to become such a showcase. "It’s been a long time in the making, but we think we can offer a really unique art and culture space here," concludes Mokoena. "The marriage of the exclusive and curated nature of our interventions, and the uniqueness of the place, is what will make it work.”