Southern Guild will participate in Frieze Sculpture

Zizipho Poswa. Lobi, 2024. Frieze Sculpture 2024 installation in Regent’s Park, London. Courtesy of Linda Nylind & Frieze, Zanele Muholi. Bambatha I, 2023. Frieze Sculpture 2024 installation in Regent’s Park, London. Courtesy of Linda Nylind & Frieze.

Southern Guild is participating in Frieze Sculpture’s 2024 edition this year, which is in The Regent’s Park, London, from 18 September to 27 October – this is the gallery’s first time exhibiting at the much-celebrated public art initiative. Large-scale sculptures by South African artists Zizipho Poswa and Zanele Muholi are alongside works by 22 leading international artists sited throughout the park’s historic English Gardens. Frieze Sculpture coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which occur concurrently in The Regent’s Park (9-13 October).

Curated by Fatoş Üstek, the exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive public programme of live activations and curator-led tours. Frieze Sculpture is part of London Sculpture Week, a city-wide collaboration that also includes the Fourth Plinth, Sculpture in the City and The Line.

Forming part of Poswa’s most ambitious technical undertaking to date, Lobi (2024) is a colossal ceramic and bronze sculpture measuring over 8 feet tall. It comprises a monumental ceramic body made up of individual spherical forms supporting a heraldic bronze crest—a larger-than-life reproduction of an ornate brass hairpin worn by the Lobi people, who settled in the area that is now Burkina Faso.

The clay body was produced during a Summer 2023 residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach where Poswa had access to the centre’s immense kilns, enabling her to explore scaling up in a significant way. Lobi formed part of her most recent body of work, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), exhibited at Southern Guild Los Angeles earlier this year, which referenced Pan African traditions of bodily adornment and precious metal jewellery. Often passed through generations of women as family heirlooms, jewellery’s importance surpasses its material value to encompass cultural, geographic, sentimental and matrilineal significance. In Poswa’s sculptural totem, beautification transcends beyond the decorative to become a tool for spiritual resonance.

Zanele Muholi. Bambatha I, 2023. Courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild

Muholi’s bronze work, Bambatha I (2023), depicts a monstrous engulfment of the artist’s body, or rather their biologically determined ‘box’ – a term the artist uses to refer to the space encompassing their breasts and vagina. In this queer avatar, Muholi’s figure appears trapped by malignant tubing that forms a strange, amorphous mass around them – a reference both to the artist’s struggle with fibroids and gender dysphoria. The piece is a powerful image of the somatic unease, anxiety and depression which result from incongruence with one’s own body.

Bambatha I carries a wider political resonance, too: The work was created after the artist learned about two victims of gender-based violence, whose bodies were discovered not far from their home in Durban. The suffocating entanglement is a visceral evocation of pain and anguish at the ongoing prevalence of femicide and violent hate crimes in South Africa. It was originally shown in Muholi’s eponymous solos at Southern Guild’s Cape Town and Los Angeles galleries in 2023 and 2024, respectively. In the exhibitions, the artist called for new rites of self-expression, sexuality, mothering and healing that usher in kinder modes of survival in our contemporary world. With self- portraiture as its predominant mode, Muholi’s work presents a personal reckoning with themes including sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, gender-based violence and the resultant trauma, pain and loss, sexual rights, and biomedical education. The artist’s three-dimensional expansion into bronze honours and commemorates Black women and LGBTQI+ individuals’ contributions to art, politics, medical sciences and culture.

ARTIST PROFILES

Zizipho Poswa. Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty) at Southern Guild Los Angeles (2024). Courtesy of Elizabeth Carababas/Southern Guild.

Zizipho Poswa is a Cape Town-based artist whose large-scale ceramic and bronze sculptures are bold declarations of African womanhood. Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, Poswa studied surface design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and co- founded Imiso Ceramics with Andile Dyalvane in 2005. Her practice is a deep invocation of her personal journey and an homage to the spiritual traditions and matriarchal stewardship of her Xhosa culture. Straddling figuration and abstraction, her anthropomorphic totems are characterised by an elliptical approach to form and bold colour choice. Poswa has held four solo exhibitions at Southern Guild’s Cape Town and Los Angeles galleries, and at Galerie56 in New York. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago, as well as important private and corporate collections. She has participated in group exhibitions at Kunsthal KAde (Amersfoort, The Netherlands), Marian Ibrahim (Chicago), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (Perth), and other galleries in New York, Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Liverpool and Singapore.

Zanele Muholi (2024). Courtesy of Jorge Meza/Southern Guild

Zanele Muholi is a visual activist, humanitarian and art practitioner who focuses on the documentation and celebration of the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities. Born in Umlazi, Durban, they studied Advanced\ Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg (2001-2003) and completed an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto (2009). Beginning in 2006, Muholi esponded to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTQIA+ community by photographing Black lesbian and transgender individuals, resulting in the ongoing portrait project, Faces and Phases. The more recent series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), also ongoing, shifts the lens with Muholi becoming both participant and image-maker. Muholi has been the recipient of multiple international awards and accolades, including France’s Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2017), Lucie Award for Humanitarian Photography (2019), Royal Photographic Society fellowship (2018) and Prince Claus Award (2013). Solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions including Tate Modern (2024 and 2020), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2023), Museo delle Culture Photo (2023), Gropius Bau (2021), Seattle Art Museum (2019), LUMA Westbau (2018), Fotografiska (2018), Stedelijk Museum (2017), Autograph ABP (2017), Brooklyn Museum (2015), among many others.

ABOUT SOUTHERN GUILD

Established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild represents contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. Based in Cape Town and Los Angeles, the gallery’s programme furthers the continent’s contribution to global art movements. The gallery’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, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Mint Museum, Harn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Vitra Museum, Design Museum Gent and National Gallery of Victoria.

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