South African visual artist Leonardo Sitoe, who has Mozambican family roots, is presenting Dreamscapes in Transit (Dreamlike Landscapes in Transit), an exhibition in Johannesburg that explores the relationships between memory, movement, and belonging in the contemporary urban landscape.
Curated by Muyon Mafulu, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, and sculptures inspired by the artist’s recurring dreams and his daily journeys through Johannesburg. Through a visual language shaped by Afro-surrealism, Sitoe creates imagined landscapes where reality and the subconscious intersect, giving form to reflections on identity, migration, and urban experience.
The works draw on Johannesburg’s fragmented geographies and enduring legacies of separation to construct scenes in which figures emerge and disappear, familiar spaces transform, and dreams become tools for questioning how we inhabit and understand the places we share.
According to the curatorial text, dreams have the power to carry the city with them. From this perspective, the artworks do not offer an escape from reality but rather spaces for contemplation that reveal the emotional and psychological traces left by life in large metropolitan centres.
Born in 2000 in South Africa, Leonardo Sitoe has developed a multidisciplinary artistic practice centred primarily on wood. He uses dreams as a lens through which to understand experiences related to the African diaspora, memory, and the historical processes of displacement and colonisation.
The exhibition is currently on view at the Bag Factory in Troyeville, Johannesburg, and will remain open to the public until 9 July 2026.
