Where Currents Collide: Africa’s First Ocean Photography Cathedral

Africa’s first Ocean Photography Cathedral is an amazing exhibit at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium. It turns the aquarium into a magical ocean world with 100 stunning pictures. You’ll see tiny sea bugs glowing like jewels and massive whales that seem to wrap around you. This special show helps everyone see the ocean’s beauty and why we need to protect it.

What is Africa’s first Ocean Photography Cathedral?

Africa’s first Ocean Photography Cathedral is The Ocean Photographer of the Year Exhibition, hosted at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium from December 2025 to January 2026. This unique exhibition transforms the aquarium into an immersive experience featuring 100 ocean photographs, aiming to highlight marine beauty and conservation.

A Waterfront Becomes a Window

Between the swaying Atlantic kelp forests and the Indo-Pacific’s coral cathedrals, a slender ribbon of light now cuts through Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. For six midsummer weeks, the Two Oceans Aquarium swaps its familiar soundtrack – children’s squeals, pump-room bass – for the hush of a sanctuary. From 12 December 2025 to 21 January 2026, the southern tip of Africa hosts the continent’s debut of The Ocean Photographer of the Year Exhibition: 15 000 frozen instants shrunk to 100 prints, each one a love letter, lament, and battle cry pinned beneath museum-grade glass.

The building itself has been quietly rewired. Past the turnstiles, a 12-metre veil of translucent mesh stands forever caught mid-breaker. Canon high-lumen rigs paint a slow-motion barrel across the fabric; every eight minutes the illusion folds into a single droplet that seems to fall upward, resetting the cycle. The trick borrows the same lenticular physics that let submarine periscopes flip the world – an unsubtle reminder that what follows is inverted from ordinary life, a place where lungs are baggage and light behaves like syrup.

Step through the scrim and you enter a parallel circuit grafted onto the Aquarium’s existing bones. The route spins clockwise from the I&J Ocean Exhibit to the Save Our Seas Shark Hall. Illumination is locked at 4 500 kelvin – high-noon tropics – so Fujiflex and metallic paper ignite with the same vibrancy they held 20 m down. Ventilation, usually tuned for human comfort, now puffs cooler, saltier air; every 47 seconds an invisible brume drifts past your lips, matching the period of a typical Southern Ocean swell. By the time you meet the first image – Yury Ivanov’s prize-winning amphipods – you have already inhaled three lungfuls of synthetic sea.

Miniature Empires and Liquid Mountains

Ivanov’s dragon-fruit-pink knoll of soft coral hosts two sesame-seed-sized Cyproideidae “ladybugs.” They hover on 2 mm acrylic that floats 10 cm off the wall, back-lit so the animals glow as if plugged in. The white freckles on their shells are not pigment but copepods caught between planes; Ivanov burned 110 breath-hold minutes to nail the 0.3-second alignment of antennae. Printed at 4:1, the frame lets a toddler count every ommatidium yet still fits inside a contact lens. It is the exhibition’s deliberate amuse-bouche: shrink the viewer before the giants arrive.

Around the bend, Craig Parry’s beached humpback stretches the full Penguin Tunnel wall. Shot from 32 m altitude, the 14 m body is magnified by the acrylic curve until it wraps the visitor like a distressed planet. The whale’s eye mirrors human figures – volunteers, vets, bucket-passing kids – reduced to constellations in tar. Real-time hydrophones from False Bay pipe in yacht-engine growls; each rumble syncs with the ribcage on the wall, a reminder that sound travels farther than sympathy.

Opposite, Ben Thouard’s Nazaré monster is printed on matte aluminium dibond, turning 18 m of Atlantic fury into molten pewter. A quarter-second exposure smears the lip into glass stallions yet freezes the surfer’s paddle like a Stone-Age spear. Walk head-on and you see panic; shift sideways and the face dissolves into the wave, proof that humans are momentary foam on Paleozoic geology.

Between these monuments run quieter capillaries. Jialing Cai’s thumbnail-sized larval puffer drifts inside a 6 cm-thick glass puck set at child height; edge-lighting turns the slab into a self-contained aquarium. Kids fog the surface with noses, their breath becoming the planktonic current that may one day ferry this fish to reef adulthood. Around the corner, Heng Cai’s Red Sea stingray surfs its own private sandstorm, wings casting Nazca-style shadows. The print hangs opposite the Aquarium’s ray-feed zone; at noon, calamari hits the water and real stingrays glide beneath the image, belly patterns syncing so perfectly that visitors swear the wall has come alive.

Mirrors, Microscopes and Time-Capsule Torpedoes

The jellyfish corridor now houses three blacked-out cylinders. One streams the Faroese grindadráp in blood-red reality; the same footage runs inverted next door – white gore, black sea – turning slaughter into an X-ray of collective appetite. The third tank is empty save for a mirror at its base; peers see their own faces distorted into something cetacean. No placard interrupts, only a ticking timestamp: “Last grindadráp: 142 days ago.” The silence is the accusation.

Canon’s “See the Unseen” kiosk repurposes the old frog counter. Visitors insert SD cards into tethered R5 Mk IIs fitted with 65 mm 1–5× macros; a robot arm hovers 2 cm above a petri dish swirling with live rotifers and Ivanov’s amphipod species. Ninety seconds later, 200 stacked frames yield a 100-megapixel file delivered on a bamboo USB. The queue peaks at 11 a.m., when skylight and strobe mix to make the critters sparkle like fibre-optic ornaments.

On the roof, a 6 m shipping container painted matte black functions as a walk-in camera obscura. A 20 cm aperture projects an inverted Table Bay onto a white table; every 30 minutes staff swap the surface for cyanotype-soaked fabric, producing a unique blueprint gifted to a random guest. By sunset, 15 sheets chronicle one of Earth’s busiest shipping arteries – an accidental ledger of the pressure the show decries.

The gift shop now sells pocket microscopes folded inside scallop shells and seaweed paper printed with amphipod fractals. A limited run of 50 fishing-net-canvas prints – R2 500 each – funnels proceeds to turtle rehab and Namaqualand MPA expansion. Only three remain by 27 December: puffer, ray, drooling dragon. Staff joke that apex predators are poor poster children; tourists prefer cute over toothy.

School groups receive blank postcards and one word: “plastic,” “breath,” “symbiosis,” “lonely,” “future.” Kids match word to image, write to their 40-year-old selves, then drop the card into a Navy-supplied time-capsule torpedo. On 21 January the S.A. Agulhas II will lower it 2 000 m offshore where cold-water corals may no longer grow when the postcards are retrieved. The ink is isotope-free, ensuring future microplastic assays can separate human story from ocean baseline – science wrapped in homework.

Nightfall on the Blue Planet

When day crowds evaporate, 30 late-entry guests return at 19:30 to galleries stripped of house light. Red dive torches guide them; wavelengths least bothersome to captives double as confessionals. Beneath the 10 m shark tunnel, bodies lie supine while a hammerhead silhouette glides through Thouard’s projected Nazaré curl – predator and liquid mountain fused into one slow-motion hallucination. The finale unfolds topside: the container’s aperture is capped with a 530 nm laser that scatters off the marine layer, manufacturing a green flash – the sailor’s old gateway to the afterlife. On clear nights the Milky Way slots into the bay’s reflected disk, gifting visitors twin galaxies and the vertigo of not knowing which is original.

Sales metrics pulse live on the Aquarium site. By 09:00 on 13 December, 4 200 day passes vanish; the purchase heat-map draws a diagonal from Khayelitsha to Stellenbosch that mirrors historical sardine runs. Pensioners are the fastest-growing cohort, up 43 % since announcement – lockdown nostalgia for 1980s ocean documentaries now repaid with physical access.

Even inmates cast votes. K’lip, the resident common octopus, flashes mating-white when Ivanov’s amphipods rotate past her porthole, but slips into stress-maroon at the Faroese grind. Chromatophores become ballots; biologists log the data as the ultimate focus group – art reviewed by an eight-armed critic who has never seen the open sea.

On 6 January, fifty featured photographers will dive the Aquarium’s own tanks, shooting captive tableaux that reference wild scenes already on the walls. Hourly uploads via QR codes create a Möbius strip – wild becomes art becomes captive becomes art again. A mobile sugar-cane printer spits wrist-thin strips still warm from the fuser, smelling of caramel and salt, so every visitor tears off a fresh slice of ocean destined to biodegrade before the next tide.

Thus the spiral tightens: 15 000 submissions collapse to 100 prints, 30 000 heartbeats per day balloon into postcards, postcards descend to abyal plains where real amphipods – ignorant of fame – will graze across the faces of children yet unborn, mandibles shredding ink into chitin, into coral, into the next image that will one day glow beneath another constellation of lights, in another city convinced it is the first to hear the ocean’s plea.

What is Africa’s first Ocean Photography Cathedral?

Africa’s first Ocean Photography Cathedral is The Ocean Photographer of the Year Exhibition. It will be hosted at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium from December 2025 to January 2026. This unique exhibition transforms the aquarium into an immersive experience featuring 100 ocean photographs, aiming to highlight marine beauty and conservation.

When and where will the exhibition take place?

The Ocean Photographer of the Year Exhibition will be held at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium, located at the V&A Waterfront. It will run for six midsummer weeks, specifically from December 12, 2025, to January 21, 2026.

What can visitors expect to see at the exhibition?

Visitors can expect to see 100 stunning ocean photographs from The Ocean Photographer of the Year Exhibition. The exhibit transforms the aquarium into an immersive ocean world, featuring everything from tiny, glowing marine life to massive whales that appear to wrap around you. Interactive elements include a 12-meter translucent mesh veil with projected ocean scenes, specialized lighting, and cooled, salty air to enhance the sensory experience.

What are some of the standout exhibits mentioned?

Some notable exhibits include Yury Ivanov’s prize-winning amphipods, magnified and back-lit to glow; Craig Parry’s beached humpback whale, stretching across the Penguin Tunnel wall; and Ben Thouard’s massive Nazaré wave, printed on matte aluminium dibond to create a molten effect. There are also smaller, intricate displays like Jialing Cai’s larval puffer in a glass puck and Heng Cai’s Red Sea stingray.

How does the exhibition promote ocean conservation?

The exhibition emphasizes why we need to protect the ocean by showcasing its beauty and fragility. It includes thought-provoking installations, such as blacked-out cylinders depicting the Faroese grindadráp (whale hunting) and a mirror that distorts visitors’ faces into cetacean forms, alongside a ticking timestamp of the last grindadráp. Proceeds from limited-edition gift shop items also support turtle rehabilitation and marine protected area expansion.

What unique interactive experiences are offered?

Interactive experiences include a Canon “See the Unseen” kiosk where visitors can use tethered cameras to photograph live rotifers and amphipods, receiving a 100-megapixel file. On the roof, a walk-in camera obscura projects an inverted Table Bay, allowing guests to receive a unique cyanotype blueprint. Additionally, school groups can write postcards to their future selves, which are then placed in a time-capsule torpedo to be deployed offshore.