'Wearing Thin' and 'Love Letter': Southern Guild at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025

Southern Guild gallery takes part in RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025 at Shepstone Gardens, Johannesburg, South Africa, with a dual presentation featuring new work by Xanthe Somers and Terence Maluleke. From May 21 – 25, 2025, Somers, the 2024 winner of the ANNA Award, debuts a special project of large-scale ceramic sculptures, while Maluleke presents mixed-media paintings that offer a personal tribute to Johannesburg, the city he calls home.

Wearing Thin - Xanthe Somers

The London-based Zimbabwean ceramicist developed her new body of work during a Cape Town residency linked to her ANNA Award. This latest series of braided, vessel-like sculptures continues the exploration she began in her solo exhibition Invisible Hand (2024), which reflected on traditions of basket making in Zimbabwe and the undervalued role of women's labour in post-colonial societies.

Titled Wearing Thin, the new ceramic art pieces by Somers embody a sense of unravelling. At the art fair, clay strands appear frayed and unbound, while the vessels sag and distort under their own weight. A tall, ovoid form is interrupted by a jagged fissure, symbolising tension between structure and collapse, unity and disintegration.

As the show's press release explains, "It is this locus of tension – between containment and collapse, connection and disintegration – that Somers seeks to examine as she teases apart the threads of our social fabric to expose some of the darkness within. 'Weaving is so much about finding commonality – pulling out one thread is not the same as having it all woven together. But I'm also cognisant of the violence that comes with not being included in the narrative. This work is situated between the two, recognising that weaving can be quite robust but also very fragile,' she notes."

Somers sees weaving as a metaphor for social cohesion, storytelling and the slow and repetitive nature of domestic work – cleaning, mending, stitching, sewing, cooking—that sustains communities. Her work acknowledges both the resilience and fragility of these unseen networks. The ceramics also highlight how domestic labour and handicraft—traditionally associated with women and undervalued in capitalist societies—intersect with race and class.

"It is commonly accepted that gender divides prioritise formal work over domestic work and care-taking in capitalist economies, and undervalue handicraft in contrast to art (traditionally the purview of men). Yet, even more insidious than these divides is the intersection of race, gender and class that forms the very foundation of our current milieu. In her essay Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender, political theorist Françoise Vergès draws attention to the invisibility of women of colour whose contribution – as cleaners and care-takers – enables neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism to function. She points to the dialectical relation between 'the white male performing body and the racialised female exhausted body', between 'the visibility of the final product of the cleaning/caring and the invisibility, along with the feminisation and racialisation [...] of the workers who do this cleaning/caring'," the press release mentions.

Somers' use of cloth and clay in Wearing Thin as narrative vessels speaks to these power dynamics, challenging the legacy of colonial aesthetics and the ongoing erasure of indigenous practices.

A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft - Terence Maluleke

In A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft, Maluleke reflects on the energy, complexity and humanity of Johannesburg. Raised in Soweto, Maluleke recalls childhood taxi rides with his mother to the city's wholesale markets—moments that sparked his early fascination with the city's vibrancy and scale in this new series.

As a student at the National School of the Arts, he began mapping the city for himself, navigating its dangers while discovering beauty in its informal economies and street culture among the informal traders, street vendors, commuters and residents sharing the streets. "Many of these people are occupying space they shouldn't, but as a community, they are making it work together. There is a deep human intent and a spirit of collaboration to survive in this environment, to improvise infrastructure and create a livelihood," he says.

Working from his studio in Doornfontein, Maluleke creates narrative-rich paintings that mix the real and imagined: vignettes of lovers shielded from the orange flares of gunfire outside; a pair of hadedas (Joburg's ubiquitous birds) perched on plastic chairs; a potted plant overlooking warehouses and the Hillbrow Tower. "His narrative approach encompasses the sombre reality of life on the economic margins with a portrait of an exhausted zama zama (illegal miner), taking stock of the tragic price paid by others who have ventured into abandoned mines. Maluleke's palette is suffused with yellow tones, calling to mind the city's infamous mine dumps and vistas of sun-bleached veld, but simultaneously registering beats of hope and optimism too," the gallery relays.

As exhibited at the art event, his technique blends paint with charcoal and pencil, building layered, textured surfaces. Fragmented perspectives and unfinished edges give the works a raw immediacy. Burglar bars and checkerboard tiles become visual frameworks, suggesting both confinement and order. "There's a defiance and a humanity about the world he is building in this new body of work, whose inhabitants 'have a disregard for a system that sometimes feels like it's not for them. But they still occupy it. It's as if they are saying, before the system catches up, you'll find us here. There is a gap that needs to be filled, and that's where you'll find us'," as elaborated in the press release.