Rory participated as a Curatorial Fellow for the Fall 2026 Athens Residency. Click here to see Rory’s program.
Rory Tsapayi is an independent curator based between Cape Town, Harare, and Dublin, focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century southern African ecosocial histories. Rory is the Assistant to the Curator of the 61st Biennale Arte di Venezia: In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh (2026) and the co-curator (with Raul Jorge Gourgel) of the SADC* Biennale (2025, 2027), a seriously satirical investigation of the national pavilion form and its unraveling in a southern African context. Tsapayi is currently completing an MA in Visual History at the University of the Western Cape and serving on the Selection Committee for the Future Generation Art Prize (Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, 2026). Rory was formerly a Curatorial Researcher at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. His work poetically entangles the elemental, the political, the aesthetic, and the affective in search of new ways of relating to our worlds.
His exhibitions include And I, a newly evolved fish (Iyatsiba Lab, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, 2025) Midas Touch – Khanyi Mawhayi (CHURCH Projects, Cape Town, 2023); Selections from the Collection and Spring is Rebellious: The Art and Life of Albie Sachs (Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2024, 2025) and forthcoming projects at The Dock Arts Centre (Leitrim, Ireland, 2027) and Ichihara Lakeside Museum (Chiba, Japan, 2028).