We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here: Inherited Frequencies

Botswana-born artist Thero Makepe presents 'We Didn’t Choose to Be Born Here: Inherited Frequencies' at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, an exhibition running until February 13, 2027. The show combines staged portraiture, archival imagery, and documentary photography to explore themes of memory, migration, and political inheritance, focusing on the intertwined histories of Botswana and South Africa. Makepe traces his own family’s anti-apartheid struggle, including his grandfather Hippolytus Mothopeng’s flight from apartheid South Africa and the legacy of PAC leader Zephaniah Mothopeng, treating history as fragmented and continuously reassembled rather than fixed.