Art
Unpop
Emerging from South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall movement, Un-pop subverts Warhol’s iconic cans with local Rhodes-brand tins, contrasting exploitative colonial monuments with the humble preservation of everyday food. Through mobile augmented reality, viewers project, scale, and reposition these virtual objects within their own surroundings. Unlike the stubborn permanence of stone and bronze, these digital cans embrace fragility and transience, ghostly artifacts that come and go on a screen, reminding us that imperial power fades, while the necessity of daily survival quietly endures.
2019
Article
Is Goodman Gallery Still an Anti-Apartheid Gallery?
Goodman Gallery built its reputation as an anti-apartheid sanctuary, yet director Liza Essers’s tenure on the South African Jewish Board of Deputies reveals an unresolved institutional contradiction. Historically, the SAJBD favored state proximity over moral resistance, ostracizing radical Jewish activists while aligning with the National Party. Today, as international consensus names Israeli policy an apartheid crime, institutional silence persists.
2023
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Art
Desperate Agnosticism
Desperate Agnosticism uses a personal crisis of faith to look at South Africa’s economic divide. Just as panic creates an instinctive reach for belief, our leaders chase high-tech digital promises while basic power and rail networks fall apart. Using an AI model, the project blends photos of Ailanthus altissima along the M1 highway with digital clouds. By setting sky-high tech ambitions against our main transit route, the work highlights a simple reality: you can promise the future in the sky, but when the road stops moving, those on the tarmac are the ones who wait.
2026
View the series: Unpop ArtRhodes Can off the shelf – Unpop Art (2019), Augmented Reality App by Oliver Mayhew
Art

Unpop Art

2019
Emerging from South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall movement, Un-pop subverts Warhol’s iconic cans with local Rhodes-brand tins, contrasting exploitative colonial monuments with the humble preservation of everyday food. Through mobile augmented reality, viewers project, scale, and reposition these virtual objects within their own surroundings. Unlike the stubborn permanence of stone and bronze, these digital cans embrace fragility and transience, ghostly artifacts that come and go on a screen, reminding us that imperial power fades, while the necessity of daily survival quietly endures.
Video
The African Philosophy Ubuntu for space
Can the communal ethics of Ubuntu survive the unforgiving margins of interplanetary survival? Drawing on Nyasha Mboti’s critique of romanticized collectivism, the project reconsiders relational philosophy through the lens of off-world colonization. In extreme, isolated habitats, mechanical obedience fractures group cohesion just as quickly as unrestrained ego. Field studies from Antarctic stations show that keeping an isolated group alive requires balancing personal agency with shared duty.
2026
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Article
Is William Kentridge Artwashing Israel?
Can a living artist truly serve as a custodian of history? Examining how stewardship develops across design, amateur craft, and fine art, the essay weighs William Kentridge’s position within South Africa’s post-apartheid landscape. Kentridge refrains from declaring definitive moral truths or speaking for experiences beyond his own; instead, his charcoal erasures preserve the friction of complicity, transition, and unresolved memory.
2023
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Art
Autumn Leaves
Autumn Leaves examines a world unsettled by rising nationalism, where AI fuels growing anxiety over economic irrelevance. Drawing parallels to 1948 South Africa, the exhibition maps this tension using machine learning. Archival apartheid footage merges with studies of two contrasting trees: the fast-growing Chinese Ailanthus altissima and the slow-rooting, indigenous Nuxia floribunda. The work points to a simple truth: history shows that when people feel left behind by an economy, they tend to choose political anger over quiet irrelevance.
2019

About

Oliver Mayhew is a South African New Media artist whose practice investigates the intersections of technology, ecology, and corporate systems. A Visual Arts graduate from the University of Pretoria, Mayhew mainly utilizes GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) models, and interactive game environments to investigate socio-economic issues.