SOUTHERN GUILD | HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NEW YORK’S ARMORY SHOW SOUTHERN GUILD |

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NEW YORK’S ARMORY SHOW SOUTHERN GUILD

A presentation of work by artists Zizipho Poswa, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Manyaku Mashilo and Oluseye

Southern Guild has exhibited for the first time at The Armory Show in New York City at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side from 8-10 September. Situated in the main section of the fair, the gallery’s booth has focused on the work of sculptural artist Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), painters Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa) and Manyaku Mashilo (South Africa) and conceptual artist Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada).

Driven by a deep interest in materiality and process, Southern Guild offers a platform for diverse African narratives explored through multi-disciplinary art forms. The gallery’s presentation at the Armory speaks of its interest in bringing the ancestral into conversation with the contemporary.
Southern Guild’s booth has featured:

New and recent work by South African sculptural artist Zizipho Poswa, including a monumental all-bronze totem explicitly commissioned for the fair, alongside a pair of sculptures from the artist’s 2022 body of work, uBuhle boKhokho (Beauty of Our Ancestors). Inspired by her Xhosa culture and evoking powerfully feminine forms, the artist’s work pays tribute to the matriarchs and rural African women who raised her. Poswa’s participation in the Armory Show follows her warmly received first US solo, iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), at Galerie56 in New York’s Tribeca this past spring; a three-month summer residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics (CCC) at California State University in Long Beach (CSULB); and inclusion in Terra Recognita: A Ceramic Story at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago.

Several expansive paintings by young Iranian artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh, whose solo exhibition at Southern Guild’s Cape Town gallery coincides with the fair. Born just outside Tehran, Bineshtarigh moved to South Africa with his family when he was 15 years old. The artist’s interest in text, particularly Arabic script and calligraphy, has become an explorative means to study the nature of mark-making and the cultural complexities that often arise through translation. Bineshtarigh’s singular process involves applying layers of ink, paint, and glue to the walls of his studio building, a historic clothing factory in a gentrifying industrial neighborhood of Cape Town, which he peels away from the structure before applying a hessian backing. The finished work stands as a record of the passing of time, a multidimensional spatial archive.
A series of acrylic and ink paintings by South African artist Manyaku Mashilo depict spectral scenes of figures floating through liminal, dreamlike landscapes. Reconfiguring elements of myth, science fiction, spiritual tradition, and ritual, Mashilo’s works reveal an ever-expanding new realm for healing the past and reimagining future realities. Cinematic in their vision, her paintings oscillate between figuration and abstraction, pitting flatly painted shapes against areas suffused with ink wash. Mashilo will hold her first solo exhibition with Southern Guild in November.

Multiple installations of talisman-like objects from Nigerian-Canadian artist Oluseye’s ongoing Eminado Series. Made from “diasporic debris” – artifacts, discarded materials, and found objects he collects on his trans-Atlantic travels – these works embody the transgenerational movement of the Black diaspora. Oluseye was an artist-in-residence at the GUILD Residency in Cape Town in early 2023, during which some of these works were completed. He will hold his first solo exhibition with Southern Guild in November 2023.

Southern Guild’s presentation at Armory is rooted in a shift toward a new African vanguard where purpose and representation can be renegotiated with vital agency. The featured artists call to an alternate world to shed historical traumas and reimagine a healed, whole, and more abundant self.
In addition to the main fair, Southern Guild will also participate in Armory Off-Site, the fair’s outdoor art program, which brings large-scale artworks to New York City’s parks and public spaces. Zizipho Poswa’s Mam’uNoBongile (part of iiNtsika zeSizwe) has been one of three large-scale sculptures displayed at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during the US Open (22 August – 10 September 2023).

KAMYAR BINESHTARIGH

Kamyar Bineshtarigh was born in the small town of Semnan, about 200 km east of Tehran in Iran, in 1996 and moved to South Africa with his family when he was 15. Based in Cape Town, he works in a variety of media. His conceptual concerns range from language and communication in all its forms to the movement, migration, and displacement of humankind.
In 2019, Bineshtarigh graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town, where he received the Ruth Prowse Award for his series An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient. In 2021, he was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize for his graduate exhibition at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, as well as a Creative Knowledge Resources Fellowship from the National Research Foundation and UCT. He was awarded the VAA award by ARP Residency in 2018, which led to his video work Shelter being screened at the Corto Lovere Film Festival in Lovere, Italy.
The artist’s interest in text, particularly Arabic script and calligraphy, has become an explorative means to study the nature of mark-making and the cultural complexities that often arise through translation.
The script carries our collectively imposed meaning but also a multitude of intuitive translations, as well as an innate aesthetic of form and shape.

This is embodied through the additive act of layering in Bineshtarigh’s works, with the artist utilizing canvas, ink, pencil, shards of glass, glue, or layers of paint extracted from the very walls of his studio. Bineshtarigh frequently works on an immersive scale, creating site-specific installations that are arresting in their capacity to envelope the viewer.
Bineshtarigh’s solo exhibitions include Koples boek(e) at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg (2021), Pilgrim as part of Everard Read’s Cubicle Series (2019), and Uncover at Norval Foundation (2022), which named him the inaugural winner of the Bowmans Young Artists Award. He has participated in group exhibitions at galleries, including Stevenson, SMAC, Everard Read, the Association of Visual Arts, and the NIROX Foundation.
The artist is currently pursuing an honors degree in contemporary art at Cape Town Creative Academy.

MANYAKU MASHILO

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 personalized, 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.

Notable group exhibitions include SCENORAMA, curated by Gabi Ngcobo at the Javett Centre in Pretoria (2022); SMO Contemporary’s group presentation at ArtXLagos in Lagos, Nigeria (2021); 40 under 40 at KRONE X WHATIFTHEWORLD in Tulbagh (2021); The Medium is the Message, curated by Azu Nwagbogu at Unit London in London, UK (2020); and Liminality in Infinite Space at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos (2020).
Solo presentations include There Are Other Worlds They Have Not Told You Of at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town and The Possibility of a Journey, curated by Tammy Langtry as part of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, South Africa, both in 2020. Mashilo’s 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 the United States of America.

OLUSEYE

Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Born in London in 1986, the artist spent his childhood years in Lagos, Nigeria, before moving to Canada.
Using “diasporic debris” — a term he coined to describe the artifacts, discarded materials, and found objects he collects from his trans-Atlantic travels — Oluseye explores Black being across themes. These transformational objects are recast into sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Their explorations invoke Oluseye’s personal narratives and travel within a broader examination of Black and Diasporic cultures, migration, and spiritual traditions. The talismans in his Eminado series physically trace and embody the transgenerational movement of the Black diaspora.
Across his practice, he embraces the notion of Blackness as divine, fluid, and unfixed, unbound by time, space, and geographies.

As such, his work blends the ancestral with the contemporary, the traditional with the modern, the physical with the spiritual, the new with the old, and the past with the future.
Oluseye has a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University, Montreal, and a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School, London, UK. He has exhibited at the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo (2022), the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021), Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen’s University, Kingston (2021), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015). His first public art commission, Black Ark, installed in Toronto’s Ashbridges Bay Park, explores Canada’s role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Oluseye was an artist-in-residence at the GUILD Residency in Cape Town in early 2023 and has presented his work with Southern Guild at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Expo Chicago.

ZIZIPHO POSWA

Zizipho Poswa is a Cape Town-based ceramic artist whose large-scale, hand-coiled sculptures are bold declarations of African womanhood. She is inspired by the daily Xhosa rituals she witnessed as a young girl growing up in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and the life-sustaining roles that Xhosa women play in traditional and contemporary life.

Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha, Poswa studied surface design and graduated from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. She draws on this knowledge to amalgamate the visual stimuli she encounters in her daily life into a simplified pattern language. In 2005, she and fellow ceramicist Andile Dyalvane opened their studio, Imiso (meaning “tomorrow”) Ceramics.

Poswa’s work for Southern Guild explores her personal experience and heritage in monumental sculptural pieces. Her first major series, Umthwalo (meaning “load”), paid tribute to Southern Africa’s rural women and the heavy burdens they balance on their heads, often walking long distances on foot. Her second series, Magodi, was inspired by the central role that hair salons play as a meeting place for African women. Each work is named after a family member or close friend, giving vivid, physical form to the artist’s own support network.

Poswa’s debut solo, iLobola, comprised 12 ceramic and bronze sculptures paying homage to the spiritual offering at the heart of the ancient African custom of lobola, or bride-wealth – the cow. Like some of Poswa’s earlier works, this series straddles figuration and abstraction, employing an intuitive vocabulary of shape, color, and texture.

Her second solo, uBuhle boKhokho (Beauty of Our Ancestors), drew inspiration from the elaborate art of hairstyling practiced by Black women across the African continent and diaspora. The series of 24 monumental ceramic and bronze sculptures was accompanied by a series of photographic portraits of the artist, who collaborated with a hairstylist to recreate some of the most iconic styles on herself.

Poswa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the LOEWE Foundation, as well as significant private and corporate collections worldwide. In 2021, she was a featured artist with Andile Dyalvane in the inaugural Indian Ocean Craft Triennial in Perth, Australia, and was included in Self-Addressed, curated by Kehinde Wiley at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles. She has participated in group exhibitions in New York, Paris, Hamburg, and Liverpool and presented her work through Southern Guild at Expo Chicago, Design Miami, The Salon Art + Design in New York, and PAD London. She is an artist-in-residence at the Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, California State University, Long Beach, in Summer 2023.

See the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #85