The 2Roads Foundation has officially opened its international exhibition, 2ROADS – Global Avenues: Navigating New Horizons, in Geneva, Switzerland, marking a significant moment for South African contemporary art and for the Foundation’s Gallery on the Greens Residency. The official opening took place on Thursday in Geneva, where invited guests gathered to experience the exhibition following the artists’ arrival earlier in the week.
The exhibition features work by Sibusiso Molwantwa, Lemé Arends, Alfred Kitsi and Victor Eniola, four artists selected through the 2Roads Foundation’s inaugural Gallery on the Greens Residency. Developed in South Africa as a residency focused on mentorship, studio practice and professional growth, the programme was created to support emerging and independent visual artists and connect them with meaningful opportunities for long-term development.
Presented at Artium Gallery in Geneva, the exhibition represents the international extension of that journey, taking work developed through the residency onto a global platform. For South African audiences, the opening demonstrates the growing role local institutions can play in creating international pathways for African artists and in expanding the global visibility of talent nurtured on the continent.
“This exhibition is an important milestone not only for the artists, but also for the Foundation’s broader vision of creating access, visibility and opportunity through the arts,” said the chairman the 2Roads Group, Kingsley Duba. “To see work that began within a South African residency now presented in Geneva is a powerful reminder that African artists belong in global conversations and spaces.”
The Gallery on the Greens Residency was established as a six-week immersive programme hosted at the 2Roads Retreat by the Vaal River, where new generation artists are given time, space and support to deepen their practice. Through mentorship and professional development, the residency seeks to equip artists not only to produce new work, but also to build sustainable careers within the broader art ecosystem.
The Geneva exhibition is open to the public and, according to the Foundation’s published exhibition information, remains on view through August 2026. The successful opening night now positions the exhibition as both a cultural milestone for the participating artists and a broader statement about the export of African creative excellence to international audiences.
Sibusiso Molwantwa — Johannesburg, South Africa
Photography
Sibusiso Molwantwa is a Johannesburg-based photographer whose contemplative practice sits at the intersection of spirituality, ancestral memory and contemporary South African identity. Working primarily in still image, Molwantwa uses light, stillness and the quiet authority of the portrait to draw out what lies beneath the visible, the histories carried in a face, a posture, a landscape. His residency body of work continues a long-running enquiry into how the sacred persists in everyday African life, and what it means to make spiritual experience visible without flattening it.
For the Geneva exhibition, Molwantwa presents new photographic works produced during the Gallery on the Greens Residency.
Lemé Arends, Johannesburg, South Africa
Painting and Mixed Media
Lemé Arends is a painter and mixed-media artist whose work investigates colonial memory, narrative landscape and the layered terrain of South African history. Combining painting with collage, text and found material, Arends builds dense, image-rich surfaces that ask viewers to read landscape the way one reads an archive, for what is recorded, what is omitted, and what is allowed to remain.
Her residency works for Global Avenues extend this practice into new territory, treating the journey from South Africa to Geneva itself as a site of negotiation between place, history and belonging.
Alfred Kitsi — Cape Town, South Africa
Surrealist Painting
Alfred Kitsi is a Cape Town-based painter working in a surrealist register that confronts trauma, horror and the inner architecture of identity. His canvases stage uncanny encounters, bodies caught between forms, environments that refuse to resolve, and use the language of the dream to make the unspeakable available to looking. Kitsi’s work has been recognised for the precision with which it holds discomfort: never gratuitous, always insisting that the viewer remain.
In Geneva, Kitsi exhibits a suite of new paintings developed during the residency.
Victor Eniola – Lagos, Nigeria
Digital Art and Painting
Victor Eniola is a Lagos-based artist working across digital art and painting to explore human emotion and the invisible connections that bind people, places and inner lives. Eniola treats the digital and the painterly as a single continuum , using one to interrogate the other, and is particularly interested in how feeling moves between bodies, screens and shared spaces.
As the Nigerian voice in the Global Avenues cohort, Eniola brings a distinctly West African perspective to the residency’s shared conversation, and presents new digital and painted works in Geneva.
About 2Roads Foundation
The 2Roads Foundation is the nonprofit arm of the 2Roads Group and is committed to driving meaningful change through arts, entrepreneurship, and education. Guided by the ethos of taking the road less travelled, the Foundation develops initiatives designed to unlock opportunity, foster social cohesion and support individuals with the potential to create lasting impact in their communities.
https://2roadsfoundation.org.