Southern Guild debuts FOG Design + Art 2025 with collectible design and contemporary art by leading artists from across Africa, including a selection of photographic portraits from Zanele Muholi’s seminal Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness) series and ceramic sculpture by Andile Dyalvane. The gallery will also show specially commissioned paintings by Manyaku Mashilo, Mmangaliso Nzuza and Ayotunde Ojo; ceramic and bronze sculptures by Zizipho Poswa; hand-thrown ceramic seating by Chuma Maweni; and tables by Charles Haupt made from bronze and glass. There will also be a painting by Alexandra Karakashian made with used engine oil.
Zanele Muholi presents seven photographic self-portraits from their defining series, ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ (Hail, the Dark Lioness). The ongoing project, first begun in 2012, now stands as an expanding archive, a statement of intimate Queer representation through the act of self-portraiture. The series sees Muholi as both fluid subject and vigorous image-maker. While one black-and-white portrait documents the artist in a quotidian moment of rest, other works present Muholi as a shifting vessel for different characters and archetypes. Impromptu and nomadic, the portraits employ objects beyond their primary functions: disposable cameras are strung together to form a garment; swimming goggles become a sartorial statement; a collective of wooden clothing pegs sit atop the artist’s head like a crown. This fractious utility echoes a broader disruption from within Muholi’s driving creative motivation. ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ is iconoclastic in its documentation of Muholi’s changing form, responding to the near invisibility of Black women and non-binary bodies as subjects of representation in the history of Western painting and portraiture prior to the 20th century.
Further, Southern Guild debuts FOG with an arch-shaped mixed media painting from South African artist Manyaku Mashilo hangs portal-like, which extends into the artist’s expansive, imagined world. Mashilo’s fluid figures come into being within this liminal, intersectional space, unencumbered by the weight of temporal containment or limitation. Mashilo’s luminously rendered canvases synthesise a range of art historical and cultural references, drawing from elements of her own upbringing, African myth, folklore, music and ritual.
Mmangaliso Nzuza’s large-scale figurative oil painting expands on the artist’s richly allegorical vernacular. Nzuza’s weighted subjects find ease in invented landscapes: bodies of water are sites of ritual cleansing; wheat fields connote the act of harvest, the ripening of time, care and the tender gesture of art-making itself. Nzuza’s figures exude a particular sculptural dignity, with the body being utilised as an instrument to explore possibilities of composition and angular form. Working textural fragments of impasto paint into patchwork planes of movement and light, Nzuza has developed a distinct hand with a growing collector audience. The artist’s participation in FOG follows his 2024 debut solo exhibition ‘An Open Letter‘ at Southern Guild Cape Town.
Alongside Nzuza, Nigerian artist Ayotunde Ojo’s oil, acrylic and charcoal painting is a distilled vignette intimately documenting subjects within his home studio in Lagos. Building up his surfaces in a process of accumulative gesture and line, Ojo’s works create variable experiences of memory, light and perception. Depicting loved ones and friends as his chosen subjects, these figures quietly operate within the layered confines of the canvas, going about their day-to-day acts of life, domestic care, leisure and being. Ojo’s solo exhibition ‘These Four Walls‘ is currently on view at Southern Guild Cape Town until March 2025.
Two sculptural forms by ceramic artist Zizipho Poswa depict the daily labours of South African women. Poswa’s hand-built, glazed ceramic work ‘uNa’kaMzingisi’ (Mzingisi’s Mother) was first exhibited in the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s 2024 group exhibition, ‘Ecospheres‘, alongside artists including Sutapa Biswas, Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Bronwyn Katz. The work abstracts the image of mother and child, conceptually rooted in the honouring of Poswa’s enduring matrilineal connection. ‘Mam’uNoSayini’ is an all bronze work from the ceramist’s 2023 solo in New York, ‘iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation)‘. Titled after a significant woman from Poswa’s home village of Holela in the rural South African province of the Eastern Cape, the work depicts a bundle of firewood atop a stippled patinated bronze body. The daily collection of firewood requires numerous hands, offering the opportunity for commune, exchange and connection amongst the village’s women.
Further functional earthenware seating by South African master ceramist Chuma Maweni will also be exhibited. Maweni is currently exhibiting works alongside fellow Southern Guild artists Zanele Muholi and Zizipho Poswa in the Museum of the African Diaspora’s group exhibition ‘Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy‘, on view until 2 March, 2025. His debut solo exhibition ‘iMvelaphi‘ is currently on view at Southern Guild Cape Town until the end of January 2025. As Southern Guild debuts FOG, this debut also makes Southern Guild the first and only gallery from the African continent to participate at FOG. Since opening a second location in Los Angeles in February 2024, it is also the only South African gallery to have a permanent space in the US. Southern Guild continues to further the continent’s contribution and inclusion in global arts movements. Southern Guild will be at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture Booth 306 in San Francisco from the 23rd until the 26th of January 2025.
