Amsterdam | Private Exhibition Tour, Wine & Discussion | Simphiwe Ndzube

✨ Around Midnight: Music, Memory & Night Worlds

🗓️Saturday, May 16th · 14:00 – 17:00 ·

📍Stevenson Gallery, Amsterdam

Join us for an evocative encounter with Around Midnight, a solo exhibition by Simphiwe Ndzube. Through this new body of work, Ndzube explores painting as a space of movement and depth, drawing on histories of music, resistance, and community.

Our first tour in Amsterdam is hosted by Stevenson Gallery; this intimate gathering invites you into nocturnal worlds where figures dance, play, and linger beneath cosmic night skies. Rooted in references to 1950s apartheid South Africa, the works trace connections between sound, memory, and identity, where music becomes a force that animates and holds space, even in darkness. Magical realism allows a different reality to take shape.

What’s included🍷 Open wine bar🖼 Guided tour of the exhibition💬 Conversation prompts to spark reflection and dialogue🧭 Facilitated discussion

About the ExhibitionCreated during his two-month residency at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam, in collaboration with ZAM Magazine, Around Midnight marks a return to painting for Ndzube. Moving away from installation, he builds dimensionality through layered brushstrokes, creating scenes that feel both suspended and alive.

Referencing figures such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, alongside the photography of Bob Gosani, the works situate themselves within a rich cultural and political history. Under glowing palettes and vast night skies, these moments unfold as both intimate and expansive, holding a quiet tension between past and present.

My take on the exhibit

Around Midnight feels like entering a moment just before something begins. The stories carried through music sit at its core, and in Nzube’s magical realism, these become tangible, holding joy, victory, and legacy.

In conversation with Chibuye, he spoke about this sense of a “messaging gift”, a path one carries forth. In around midnight, he returns to an ancestral quest, tracing figures like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, who built legacies beyond South Africa while remaining rooted in it.

He looks back to those who communicated something expansive and otherworldly, yet always from an undeniable starting point: South Africa, the township, Sophiatown, and the spectacle of nightlife become both reference and place of inward return.

About the Gallery

Stevenson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2003, with roots in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It has built an international reputation for supporting artists whose work engages with identity, history, and socio-political realities.

The Amsterdam space extends this vision into a European context, creating a platform for dialogue between artists from the African continent, its diaspora, and global audiences.

Through exhibitions and collaborations, Stevenson supports a diverse roster of artists across mediums, fostering practices that are both locally grounded and internationally resonant.

✨ Limited spots. Intimate group. Shared reflection.

​​Cancellation PolicyCancellations made more than one week before the event are eligible for either:

​​a credit towards another Pink Poodle Society event for the full ticket amount, or​​a refund minus the 6% platform and ticketing fees (non-refundable).

​​Cancellations made within one week of the event are non-refundable and non-exchangeable.