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As Cape Town’s art calendar reaches its annual crescendo with the Investec Cape Town Art Fair underway, The Silo Hotel has added an intimate new layer to the city’s arts and culture scene.
The Salon, a new exhibition located in The Vault at The Silo Hotel, opened on Wednesday evening and will be in residence for the next 12 months.
The Silo, part of the Royal Portfolio Collection owned by Liz Biden, is perched alongside the Zeitz MOCAA within the V&A Waterfront’s historically repurposed grain silo complex, making it a sought-after destination on the itineraries of art and architecture enthusiasts.
Presented in collaboration with Brundyn Arts & Culture, the exhibition reflects an intimate, three-wall space hung from floor to ceiling in the stylistic salon tradition. Viewable by guided tour only, The Salon is experienced through private walkthroughs led by Michael Jacobs, Art Concierge at The Silo Hotel.
According to Jacobs, the exhibition places emerging contemporary artists alongside established figures such as William Kentridge, Peter Clarke, Dumile Feni and Zanele Muholi in close conversation.
Jacobs sees his role as a vital bridge between hospitality and culture, guiding guests through both the exhibition and Cape Town’s wider creative landscape. His approach also reflects a growing shift in cultural travel - away from surface-level sightseeing and towards more personal, behind-the-scenes encounters.
“The guest who stays with us wants to engage with the city in a more subversive way - not tourism from the car, but tourism with the people,” says Jacobs. “When you enter an artist’s studio, you cross into a private space of thinking and processing, and that kind of intimacy changes how you experience art.
The Salon exhibition further amplifies curatorial depth, according to Elana Brundyn, who has had a profound impact on South Africa’s art landscape as the founding CEO of the Norval Foundation and an inaugural director at Zeitz MOCAA.
Playing a formative role in shaping the contemporary museum infrastructure in the city, Brundyn emphasised that supporting the arts isn’t just about collecting work, but to see exhibition-making as an art form itself.
“The artist is super important, and there’s also a very strong focus on the collector, because they’re the people who help us get to the next level, as they support artists from the beginning stages, they’re essential. Yet, building the infrastructure and focusing on curators and how shows are curated are becoming increasingly important. It’s not just throwing work on a wall; it’s about how we keep interest, how we put the themes together," added Brundyn.
"With The Salon, relating to the old salon-style exhibitions in France, which were the blockbusters in those days, drawing thousands of people, it was structured around portraiture, landscapes and the hierarchy of these mediums. This is an important way of looking not only at the work, but at exhibition-making itself as an art form.”
Through its expanding art programme, The Silo Hotel is adding its own brand of curatorship to amplify South African and African art and to reinforce Cape Town’s status not only as a destination for major fairs and festivals, but also as a place where art is actively collected and meaningfully experienced.