There Was Something Here Before

Exhibition by Zahira Asmal
18 – 27 July 2025
Colombo 7, Sri Lanka

In a world of structured illusions, what you see is never the full picture. There Was Something Here Before is an interactive exhibition by urbanist Zahira Asmal, that introduces the interlocking layers of past, present, and planned future experience—both hyper-mediated and hidden—that constitute contemporary Cape Town. Concise and metaphorical, its layered design visualises the structural DNA of the city that continues to reproduce spatial apartheid.

The exhibition reveals the city as a palimpsest—made, shaped, and layered with time, politics, economics, and the movement of people. As the gradient shifts from the macro level of the city to more intimate, micro details, you are invited to go beyond the dominant sensory mode of sight into a more polysensory register to encounter the hidden and unseen stories of the wider Cape Town city-region. And as the textures of the exhibition shift, so too does its scale—moving from cityscape to archive to the intimacy of home.

The exhibition forms part of See, an ongoing project produced by Asmal’s agency, The City, in collaboration with individuals and institutions that are part of, or have a connection to, Cape Town’s past and present. In 2023, Asmal’s research led her to Sri Lanka, where she searched for traces of the Cape ancestors that she had learned about in archives, books, and sites of memory, and that shape the identity of their descendants. What traces of the Cape ancestors remain? Who and what did they leave behind? What stories are being told about them in the places from which they were taken? These are the questions that fired the making of this exhibition.

On arrival, the visitor, to both the exhibition and to Cape Town, encounters pristine and idyllic cityscapes. Echoing the design of the city itself, large format, framed and draped imagery occupies the central space. These are the prominent, all-too-familiar Cape Town tropes, favoured and accoladed by prime property owners, real estate agents, tourists, and investors: the mountain, the beach, the modern and developing city, the island, the garden, the ‘Malay Quarter’, the wine estate, the freedom icons, the language.

Both an architectural and aesthetic device, the frame determines what is included and what is not, what is seen and what remains out of view and ultimately out of focus, composing our experience of a place and the mental souvenir we take with us. What we see and experience of the city is determined by our everyday access to its spaces. This is vastly different for the city’s various visitors, denizens, migrants, inhabitants—even its ghosts. The dispossession of indigenous and enslaved people has led to the current housing crisis, growing informal settlements, and homelessness. Urban apartheid caused a concentration of socio-economic resources in the centralised white enclaves of the city, while people of colour were forcefully extruded to its peripheries. This forged a racial and class map, which entrenched the blueprint of violent segregation that was the defining feature of the original colonial settlements. The people who laboured to make the city and those who maintain it, continue to have limited access to it. You can walk the streets, sometimes even enter the building, but you are excluded from the frame—consigned to the city’s ragged edges.

The journey deepens for those who refuse to settle for the visual allure of the postcard view. As you move through the space, you are invited to go beyond the dominant framed optics, to experience deeper traces and tellings. The counter narratives of Cape Town are held within ten cardboard boxes and a suitcase that contain archival fragments and private worlds. Asmal’s use of the cardboard boxes is a reference to the human remains that are locked away in the ossuary of the Prestwich Memorial, a contentious heritage site located in Green Point in central Cape Town. In mid-2003, an extensive slave burial ground was uncovered during the building of a luxury development, The Rockwell. The City of Cape Town exhumed the remains and placed them in cardboard boxes—the bones of thousands of people who built the foundations of the city hidden away, while cranes and scaffolding are almost constantly in view, signalling the brazen persistence of the property boom. Contained within the boxes in the exhibition are archival objects that bespeak indigenous rites, slavery, forced removals, the suppressed history of South Africa’s ‘death squad’ units, housing struggles, displacement, South Africa’s Bill of Rights, and more. These are boxes that call to be opened.

While visiting sites of slavery and indenture in South Africa, Senegal, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Zambia, Portugal, Mozambique, and Mauritius, Asmal has often wondered: did the enslaved people get a chance to say goodbye? Who did they leave behind? Who searched, prayed, cried out for them? In most cases, identities, family lines and connections were stripped away from enslaved and indentured people, along with any link to their places of origin. In the timeless spirit of call and response, Asmal invited Cape residents – Adi Badenhorst, Daiyaan Petersen, Gulshan Khan, Marsi van de Heuvel, Patric Tariq Mellet, Uzair Ben-Ibrahim, and Yasser Booley – to contribute items that are deeply personal to them, along with handwritten notes to share with visitors to the exhibition. Imparted with trust, the artefacts contained in the suitcase invite you into people’s homes and hearts – “We are here”.

Persist. Inquire. Touch. Feel. You are encouraged to open the boxes, receive the contents of the suitcase, read the letters, hold the rubble retrieved from District Six, read the Arabic-Afrikaans poem, draw these things close and breathe in their lingering fragrances. Consider the originating threads that run between Cape Town and Colombo. How may visibility and knowing continue to connect both places—South Africa and Sri Lanka?

Public Programme

Catalysed by the content of the exhibition, Zahira Asmal—with the support of the team at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands—has curated a thought-provoking public programme to inspire participation, conversation, and debate.

All events are open to the public and free of charge. In some cases, registration may be required. Follow The City @thecityagency for programme updates.

Zahira Asmal, together with scholars from Colombo, will lead daily exhibition walkabouts. For group bookings, contact Menaka Rajapakse +94 77 876 0871.

Contributors and Acknowledgments

There Was Something Here Before was created by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City, with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka.

Palimpsest
Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-Memories of June 1976, Picador Africa, 1 June 2017.

Vergelegen Mill Race Red Blend.

Unseen
Archival material courtesy of the Western Cape Archives and Records Services, Iziko Museums, the District Six Museum and the Nationaal Archief, The Hague.

Photographs: Bruce Sutherland – Dunoon Toilets, Khayelitsha Housing and Langa Housing (2014 – 2015). Gulshan Khan / The Things We Carry with Us, Origins Chapter (2017 – ongoing). Warren Papier, Bishop Lavis, Cape Town (2015).

Constitution of South Africa, 1996, Chapter 2: Bill of Rights.

Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro, What did FW De Klerk Know About Vlakplaas and Other Apartheid Death Farms? Sowetan, 18 March 1997.

Tamsin Meterlerkamp, Cape Town’s Tafelberg case goes to ConCourt — activists call for coordinated affordable housing plan, Daily Maverick, 11 February 2025.

Respondents to ‘The City Works For You’: Asanda Ngoasheng, Bonita Bennett, Chrischené Julius, Guy Briggs, Jerry Matthews, Mandy Sanger, Masa Soko, Mike Zuma, Ophelia Ross-Simms.

We Are Here
Adi Badenhorst, Grensloos, Daiyaan Petersen, Paay Coridon’s album: from Ceylon to Cape Town, Gulshan Khan, Blood Knowledge, The Things We Carry With Us, Origins Chapter (2017 – ongoing), Marsi van de Heuvel, Clean Field, Patric Tariq Mellet, The Truth about Cape Slavery, Uzair Ben-Ibrahim, Waas os se huis? , Yasser Booley, I wonder what had become of you?