Southern Guild debuts at Frieze Sculpture 2024 with works by South African artists

From September 18 - October 27, 2024, South African art gallery Southern Guild will participate for the first time in this year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture, the much-celebrated public art initiative held at The Regent’s Park, London, UK.

Large-scale installations by South African artists Zanele Muholi and Zizipho Poswa will be displayed alongside works by 22 leading international artists throughout the park’s historic English Gardens. Frieze Sculpture coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which occur concurrently in The Regent’s Park from October 9 - 13, 2024.

Bambatha I (2023) by Zanele Muholi

Muholi is a South African artist, visual activist and humanitarian whose work is a documentation and celebration of the lives of South Africa’s queer communities.

Muholi’s bronze sculpture Bambatha I (2023) illustrates a large 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, the sculpture artist’s figure appears trapped by malignant tubing that forms a strange, amorphous mass around them–a reference to both, 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 the loss of belonging to 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 sense of suffocation depicted through the sculpture 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 solo exhibitions at Southern Guild’s Cape Town and Los Angeles galleries in 2023 and 2024. In these exhibitions, the artist called for new rites of self-expression, sexuality, mothering and healing that usher in kinder survival modes. 

Muholi’s work, mostly self-portraiture and activist art, presents a personal reckoning with themes including sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, sexual rights and biomedical education, gender-based violence and the resultant trauma, pain and loss. The artist’s three-dimensional expansion into bronze honours and commemorates Black women and LGBTQIA individuals’ contributions to art, politics, medical sciences and culture.

Lobi (2024) by Zizipho Poswa

Poswa is a Cape Town-based installation artist whose large-scale ceramic art and bronze sculptures are often seen as bold declarations of African womanhood.

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 Poswa's Summer 2023 residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach and forms 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 art, beautification transcends beyond the decorative to become a tool for spiritual resonance,” says the artist.

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.