Abstracting notions of place, land and body through Thresholds at Southern Guild

Southern Guild in Cape Town presents Thresholds, a multidisciplinary group exhibition featuring 18 contemporary artists whose practices trace entanglements between land and body, running from May 29 – August 14, 2025. The exhibition aims to reframe the South African landscape not as a passive backdrop but as a dynamic site of history and resistance.

In Western art history, landscapes have often been used to show idealised visions of beauty, ownership and control, but they leave out important realities like the lives of indigenous people or the violence of colonisation. In South Africa, the history of landscape painting is closely tied to colonial land theft, the forced separations of Apartheid and deep-rooted indigenous understandings of the land. "The exhibition brings land and place into focus. Here, land is neither static nor inert—it is contested, fluid and charged with histories of displacement, belonging and transformation," shares Southern Guild in the show's official release.

Many of the works in this art exhibition use natural materials and ancestral knowledge to respond to today's environmental and social challenges, works that are both political and deeply personal. Simphiwe Buthelezi's tactile abstractions, made from sea sand, reeds and Zulu seed beads, operate as mnemonic landscapes—navigating themes of community and nationhood. Nozuko Madokwe gathers pigment from Cape Town's mountains, transforming rock into paint through a gestural process that collapses boundaries between body, earth and spirit.

Belinda Blignaut's ceramic vessels, made from wild clay and found matter such as snake skin and shells, embrace rupture as part of creation, while Madoda Fani continues the legacy of Southern Africa's ceramic traditions through smoke-fired forms etched with insectile precision. Fani's contemporary artworks hold a resilience that honours the journey of his community and deep-rooted heritage.

In painting, themes of reclamation and rest recur. Mmangaliso Nzuza's oil-painted figures retreat to imagined landscapes of stillness and dignity, while Daniel Levi's surreal terrains, drawn from personal and art historical memory, reflect the dreamlike elasticity of place. Zarah Cassim's soft, overgrown scenes similarly blur the boundary between interiority and environment.

Photography becomes a site of reckoning and vulnerability. Thero Makepe's portraiture unpacks exile, state violence and generational trauma, while Rochelle Webster Nembhard and Gemma Shepherd's collaborative series interrogates the female body as a fraught, symbolic landscape—both divine and commodified.

In sculpture and installation, Patrick Bongoy's use of salvaged rubber and rope evokes urban decay and resilience, while Nthabiseng Kekana merges industrial design with personal symbology. Mankebe Seakgoe's hybrid objects trace lived experience through speculative form, and Luyanda Zindela's mixed-media works echo themes of absence and repair.

Justine Mahoney and Lulama Wolf each address bodily sovereignty and myth. Wolf's abstract female forms, painted with sand-infused acrylic, reject objectification. "As women, and particularly Black African women, our bodies are sites of possession. We are so often viewed outside of ourselves as extensions of territory conquered, cultivated and politicised," Wolf writes in an official release. Mahoney's figures, on the other hand, are perforated and abstracted as the masculine and feminine become an amorphous entanglement.

"As landscapes—both real and imagined—edge toward entropy, Thresholds asks: How do we carve out spaces of meaning, materially or metaphysically? Making becomes an act of anchoring—a way of situating oneself within the vast and shifting topographies of existence," the press release notes.