Manyaku Mashilo: An Order of Being
courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
The question in these textures is not ‘How did we get here?’ but ‘How will we survive here?’. ‘Here’ as in now, tomorrow, after, freedom – how will we be? We have all known to look to tomorrow in the pit of night before dawn breaks the sky’s surface. Abanye baye ngale, abanye ba wele - but today these textures ask: ‘So far, dear traveller, how have you found your way? How does it feel to be here, how will we know when we get there?’ - Julie Nxadi
Southern Guild is pleased to present An Order of Being, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by South African artist Manyaku Mashilo, opening 23 November 2023 (until 25 January 2024). The new body of figurative paintings navigate and construct an imaginative future realm. This abstracted plane – expansive in its capacity to heal, liberate and reinvent – is occupied by a collective of fluid, dreamlike figures.
Mashilo’s practice acts as a vehicle for sense-making; her canvases stand as liminal spaces for synthesising elements of her religious upbringing, ancestral heritage, both real and invented myth, folklore, science fiction, music and sourced archival photographic images. An Order of Being is a gentle confrontation with the multiplicity of the artist’s past, present and future facets of selfhood.
Though her work is rooted in the historically charged mode of portraiture, Mashilo regards her paintings as abstractions. Ethnographic photography from the 19th and early 20th centuries disseminated distorted representations of the depicted bodies, with each subject diminished through the colonial eye of Eurocentricism. Mashilo’s figures have been crafted anew, free of projection or historical reduction. “I invent characters,” she states, “I have had to create these subjects from scratch – make skin tones, plan similarities, consider race, exaggerate features – blank my slate while contending with the reality that I cannot unsee or un-know.”
These subjects hold a self-actualised power. Their gaze pierces through the onlooker, defiantly seeking some future horizon line. Their bodies have been transformed into genderless, undefined vessels. They are uncontained, able to expand and disintegrate. Each figure blooms forth from an abstracted liminality, their forms migrating through and beyond lines that appear to contour and cloak a celestial landscape.
Installation views: “An Order of Being,” Southern Guild, Cape Town, 2023, courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
Music is a vital means to the languaging of Mashilo’s practice. The making of the exhibition’s works was deeply informed by the undulating frequencies of Blues, African gospel, spoken word and free jazz. These sounds invite ritual and a meditative space for free movement. It is this somatic experience, in its spontaneity and distinct capacity to change course, that inspires the flowing contours of Mashilo’s repeated line work. Multiple readings of these contour patterns are possible: the spiralling patterns of human fingerprints, ripples emanating from a central impact point, and the structural co-ordinates of yet-to-be-discovered clusters of stars.
“There are other worlds they have not told you of” has become a welcome mantra for the artist. The phrase was spoken by American composer, musician and poet Sun Ra (1914-1993), who recounted an epiphanic encounter with otherworldly beings following a space journey he said took place in Alabama in 1936. His resulting life-long catalogue of music – a joyful, cosmic cacophony of electronic jazz – would retrospectively be defined as a pioneering influence of Afrofuturism. Akin to the Astro-Black mythology of Sun Ra’s musical language, Mashilo’s paintings traverse a peripheral alternate space, blending the real and unreal, correcting the burdensome weight of historical injustices with the lightness and hope of what may still be yet to come.
Installation views: “An Order of Being,” Southern Guild, Cape Town, 2023, courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
The exhibition presents a new multi-panelled triptych, comprising three large-scale arch-shaped canvases. Beyond its associations with religious architecture, the arch becomes a visual metaphor for liminal movement: a simultaneous conduit for exiting and entering. The recurring use of red ochre in this body of work connotes clay, blood and the traditional ointment of “imbola”, a thick paste of burnt earth pigment applied to the faces of Xhosa women and newly initiated youth.
An Order of Being resists singular compartmentalization of the self and the cultural practices that have come to define and inform Mashilo’s unfolding sense of the world. Her subjects shapeshift between hybridised identities to welcome an alternative understanding of how a person comes into being. This future world does not repress or shame this complexity; it welcomes and holds expansive space for an evolving and indefinable multiplicity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Manyaku Mashilo is a Cape Town-based artist whose multidimensional practice encompasses mixed-media painting, drawing, and collage. Born in Limpopo in 1991, she addresses themes of spiritual identity, memory, ancestry, community and belonging.
Mashilo draws on inspiration from photographic archives to build expansive scenes where imagined representatives of Blackness migrate through abstract liminal spaces. These scenes act as celestial cartographies, connecting the depicted Black figures through a felt mutuality of heritage, spirituality, shared ritual and intent. These migratory figures, forever moving between and through, are driven by an energetic pull toward a new vanguard where purpose and representation can be renegotiated.
Mashilo’s figures are drawn from family photographs, historical imagery depicting various experiences of Black lives and portraits of people from her own community. In this way, Mashilo enmeshes the contemporary and historical as a form of interdimensional mapping. Lineage and memory, both collective and personalised, conflate in this unknown world. Her vast cosmological landscapes offer a multiverse of imagined futures, weaving together place and space, charting a rich and diverse tradition of African spirituality and identity.
Mashilo’s solo exhibition at Southern Guild, An Order of Being, in 2023 follows solos at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town and the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, both in 2020. Southern Guild has presented her work at The Armory Show in New York, Expo Chicago and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
Her work was recently included in Spectrum: On Color and Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Africa Supernova at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, and Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London. Mashilo has also participated in exhibitions at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos, the Javett Centre in Pretoria, Art X Lagos with SMO Contemporary and Unit London. Her work forms part of the Shulting Art Collection, Tiroche Deleon Collection, and The Suzie Wong Collection as well as private collections in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Korea and United States.
ABOUT SOUTHERN GUILD
Established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild represents contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. With a focus on Africa’s rich tradition of utilitarian and ritualistic art, the gallery’s programme furthers the continent’s contribution to global art movements. Southern Guild’s artists explore the preservation of culture, spirituality, identity, ancestral knowledge, and ecology within our current landscape. Their work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Mint Museum, Harn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Vitra Museum, Design Museum Gent and National Gallery of Victoria. Since 2018, the gallery has collaborated with BMW South Africa on a year-round programme of meaningful activations that promote artist development and propel their careers. Located in Cape Town, Southern Guild will expand internationally with a 5,000 sqft space opening in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles in February 2024.
For more information about this exhibit please visit the Southern Guild website.
