Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present ‘signifying the impossible song’, an expansive group exhibition curated by Lindsey Raymond and Jana Terblanche bringing together work across diverse media by 17 artists. Featured artists include Sanford Biggers (USA), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Patrick Bongoy (DRC), Ange Dakouo (Mali), Bonolo Kavula (South Africa), Nthabiseng Kekana (South Africa), Roméo Mivekannin (Ivory Coast/France), Turiya Magadlela (South Africa), Nandipha Mntambo (Eswatini/South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Zohra Opoku (Germany/Ghana), Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Usha Seejarim (South Africa), Inga Somdyala (South Africa), Moffat Takadiwa (Zimbabwe) and Lulama Wolf (South Africa).
‘signifying the impossible song’ explores the material culture of objects and the protected knowledges they hold. Encompassing mixed-media artworks, found objects, assemblage, photography, sculpture and painting, the exhibition points to the collective unravelling and structural failings of political systems. Within the material worlds that each artist explores, there are invented worlds that emerge. These are based on real events such as personal and collective memories of democracy, nationalism, civil protest, social movements, socio-cultural norms, material cultures, language and writing systems – as well as on fictional scenarios, drawing on and reimagining folklore, mythologies, dreams and utopias.
In Inga Somdyala’s re-interpretation of a failed political covenant, two contending South African flags representing the old and new political orders are resurrected, yet they curve (or slump, wounded) onto the floor. Together, their colours make up South Africa’s post-1994 national flag, a hopeful, albeit fraught symbol of a unified ‘rainbow nation.’ This speaks to what Somdyala describes as the “whimpering conclusion to the Apartheid struggle, where a negotiated peace among the political and economic elite fails to dismantle the fundamentally racist structures within South African society”.
Oluseye shows the Hot Commodity series where totems of vertically stacked vending machines containing perceived signifiers of Blackness interrogate the facile engagement with Black culture as mere commodity. The work brings together a range of items and ideas associated with Black people. This includes hair, black-eyed peas, music, cotton and a fictional ‘Black Magic’ detergent, to confront the appropriation and commercialisation of Blackness and Black people in popular culture and the industrial complex.
Assembled materials and objects come into being through the collation of many disparate elements; they remind us that the whole is made up of what was once fragmented. Therefore, ‘signifying the impossible song’ is interested in substrates, what lies beneath and between our perceptions and interactions. Seejarim’s ‘Receptible’ is one such example of this: grass brooms are layered in circular rows to create the form of a pot, conflating the modes of basket-weaving and clay coiling. Abundant and hut-like, her vessel simultaneously evokes African and African-American customs of ‘jumping over the broom’: a marital ritual implementing the new wife’s role to perform service through household labour. The mundane broom transforms into a signifier of projected femininity, domesticity and subservience.
The human need to collect items of spiritual, sentimental and cultural resonance and surround ourselves with these for comfort and identity-assurance, arises in the materiality of Patrick Bongoy, Ange Dakouo, Turiya Magadlela, Usha Seejarim and Moffat Takadiwa. Additionally, the bitter irony of Africa’s natural wealth is engrained in the repurposed materials of Bongoy, Dakouo and Takadiwa. Further, the wasteful nature of daily life is recirculated into a commentary on the complexities of post-colonial economies forced to put subsistence over ecological preservation. Wall reliefs of rubber scraps, toothbrushes, pens and newsprint are made from the hangover of past injustices, yet the skillful intervention of the hand exemplifies the ongoing process of rearticulating and rebuilding across the Global South. ‘signifying the impossible song’ opens on the 13th of September and will run until the 14th of November 2024 at Southern Guild Los Angeles.
