Event location: Bird Street Gallery
Event date and time: 25/08/2026 09:00:00
The Department of Visual Arts, in the Faculty of Humanities, invites you to attend
Unseen Together
A Visual exploration of Illness and Disability
Micaela Scholtz
Mieke Janse van Rensburg
Amberleigh du Plessis
Exhibition Opening
Monday 24 August 2026
17h00 for 17h30
Bird Street Gallery
20 Bird Street, Central, Gqeberha
Exhibition Walkabout with the Artist
Saturday 5 September 2026
10h00 - 11h00
The perception of endometriosis and disability are significantly influenced by the politics of invisibility, which refers to the notion of being overlooked or unseen. What is unseen, however, is not absent. With this awareness, the connection between endometriosis (a prevalent and often invisible gynaecological condition) and disability becomes apparent. The pain, trauma, reduced participation, and broader lived realities associated with both conditions are not easily discernible or frequently visible to others. Society teaches one that if humans follow the rules; eating well, exercising, seeking medical care, plan for the future, etc., the reward is health and prosperity. However, illness and disability disrupts this narrative, revealing the body not as a predictable machine but as a vulnerable and ever changing site of both individual, personal knowledge and uncertainty simultaneously. When the body fails to uphold this societal expectation, the narrative is rarely questioned, instead endometriosis and disability are both misread, made invisible or often denied through culture, medicine and media. This emphasises how its visibility or invisibility is socially produced, situating the representation of these conditions as a largely social and visual problem. These conditions intersect at a level of recognition, exposing the gap between embodied experience and social perception, both shaped by the visual cues through which pain and disability are either acknowledged, or dismissed.
The exhibition explores, in response, the unseen body, but also the unseen lived, physical and emotional experience of individuals with a disability or endometriosis. Developed from two distinct research projects, applying similar methodologies, the exhibition is a culmination of personal, collective, and research-based experience. Despite the different medical conditions, the works collectively explore private, internal landscapes of human self-awareness through imagery and memory to highlight the lived reality shifting it into the seen. The works interrogate and question pain, stigma, trauma, grief, and identity as a presence that forms how a body with a condition is lived, dressed, interpreted, and understood. The exhibition posits that embodied knowledge is not secondary to design or visualisation processes, but a source of valid information and meaning. The use of autoethnography and participatory design methods similarly position these lived experiences as a form of authorship, not mere disconnected content. The objective is to portray the body and the individual not as passive subjects of representation, but to mitigate reductive visual tropes of endometriosis and disability and provide a more nuanced, trauma-informed perspective.
“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” - Julian Jaynes
Daily Viewing
25 August - 11 September 2026
09h00 - 16h00, Mon - Fri
More information:
gallery@mandela.ac.za
visualarts.mandela.ac.za
