Southern Guild Cape Town presents Thresholds, a group exhibition welcoming the multidisciplinary work of 18 contemporary artists. The exhibition abstracts notions of place, documenting the body’s precarious negotiation with land, and questions our architectures – both physical and ideological – that contain, shape, root, liberate and define us. Featured artists include Simphiwe Buthelezi, Zarah Cassim, Nozuko Madokwe, Thero Makepe, Rochelle Webster Nembhard, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Mankebe Seakgoe, Gemma Shepherd, Lulama Wolf, among others.
Whether confronting the spectral weight of geopolitical borders or conjuring imagined terrains that destabilise the notion of ‘territory’, the exhibition brings land and place into focus. Here, land is neither static nor inert – it is contested, fluid, charged with histories of displacement, belonging and transformation.
The landscape has historically operated within the Western canon as a site for the projection of cultural ideals of beauty, ownership and dominion. Often employed to illustrate allegory within constructed visions of harmony and order, the genre functioned as both aesthetic spectacle and ideological apparatus, frequently erasing the presence of labour, indigenous life, or colonial violence from the frame.
South Africa’s history of landscape painting cannot be disentangled from colonial dispossession, Apartheid spatial politics, and indigenous cosmologies of land. Through this lens, earth is not to be claimed, aestheticised or extracted from. It is not neutral or decorative but politically charged and imbued with spirit, trauma and longing.
Many of the works Thresholds showcases embrace the transformative potential of organic matter and ancestral materials, exploring the ecological and social instabilities of the present through political and devotional acts of making. Using icansi (reed mats), glass beads, tankrali (ancient Zulu seedbeads), seasand, seashells and metal, Simphiwe Buthelezi crafts immersive, tactile abstractions that function as mnemonic landscapes. Intuitively navigating themes of community and nationhood, the artist gestures toward a desire to relocate the self, to return to a familiar place, whether real, invented, or symbolic.
Like Buthelezi, Nozuko Madokwe positions her practice as a site of return, an energetic conduit for reconnection with earth and divine genesis. Her process, part alchemical, part ritual, begins with pilgrimages to Cape Town’s local mountains, where she gathers rocks and sediment that are ground into richly pigmented powders and paints. The resulting works emerge through a gestural vocabulary of smudging, folding, and scattering, ultimately collapsing the boundaries between body, land and spirit.
Clay carries the weight of ancient custom and origin; to shape earth is to engage in an act of communion and transmutation, ratifying creation myths where the spark of life is believed to be formed from soil and breath. The lineage of Southern Africa’s ceramic traditions reverberates in Madoda Fani’s practice, whose smoke-fired and burnished forms evince both ancestral continuity and contemporality. Encased in rippling, hand-carved patterns that evoke insect like armour, Fani’s works hold a resilience that honours the journey of his community and deep-rooted heritage.
Central to the exhibition’s thematic throughline is the body, not merely as subject or site but as another place for both fracture and reconstitution, a vessel through which the external world is inscribed and, in turn, resisted. Mmangaliso Nzuza’s figurative oil-on-canvas painting expands on the artist’s recent impulse to depict his figures in the imagined outdoors; far removed from the politics and containment of the domestic space. In the soft dignity of Nzuza’s figures, unburdened by performance, there emerges a profound assertion of space: an insistence on rest, stillness, joy and the expansive right to subjectivity.
Melding staged portraiture with documentary photography, Thero Makepe’s work is shaped by familial rupture, the psychic toll of exile, both enforced and self-imposed, and the long shadow of state violence. Like Makepe, Rochelle Webster Nembhard and Gemma Shephard form part of a generation raised amidst the regional paradigmatic shift of the early ‘90s. Webster Nembhard and Shepherd’s series of black-and-white photographs interrogate the landscape of the female form as a locus of desire, transgression, violence and reclamation.
There are few corporeal territories as perilous as a woman’s body. Shephard images Webster Nembhard’s nude figure in varying states of surrender and restriction. Her body appears bound in synthetic hair or supine and embedded amidst graveland stone – these symbolic materials enmesh deific femininity with histories of exploitation and commodification.
Lulama Wolf’s painting resists objectification and conquest through non-representative form. Her female figure – rendered in acrylic paint mixed with sand – embraces abstraction to transcend imposed identity, asserting instead a vision of the body as sacred geography, irreducible and sovereign. The threshold of each figure has been perforated and abstracted as the masculine and feminine become an amorphous entanglement, erotic and humming with the primal friction and duality of creation, destruction, life itself.
Paintings by Zarah Cassim conflate place with the intimate, utilising the landscape as a realm for personal reflection and idealism. Cassim’s paintings appear as daydreams; luminous brushwork and a palette of fiery, soft hues render her overgrown landscapes as inner worlds embedded with nostalgia, wonder and quiet unease. As landscapes – both real and imagined – edge toward entropy, Thresholds asks: How do we carve spaces of meaning, materially or metaphysically? Making becomes an act of anchoring – a way of situating oneself within the vast and shifting topographies of existence.
Thresholds opened on the 29th of May and will run until the 14th of August 2025 at Southern Guild, Cape Town.
