Southern Guild at Expo Chicago 2023

Exhibiting at EXPO Chicago for the first time, Southern Guild presents a multi-faceted collection of ceramics, sculpture, paintings and wall reliefs by 11 leading artists from across the African continent. These include Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Andile Dyalvane (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Patrick Bongoy (DRC), Dominique Zinkpè (Benin) and Stanislaw Trzebinski (Kenya). Rich in materiality and divergent in form, the works in Southern Guild’s presentation speak of the ingenuity of the human hand and the labour intensive processes that elevate the prosaic to the sublime. The gallery’s booth will feature two large-scale ceramic and bronze sculptures from Zizipho Poswa’s critically acclaimedrecent solo, ‘uBuhle boKhokho (The Beauty of our Ancestors)’, inspired by the hairstyles traditionally worn by Black women across the continent, as well as recent works by Andile Dyalvane, Madoda Fani and Chuma Maweni – all regarded as foremost ceramicists in Africa. Anchoring the booth will be expansive and tactile palimpsests by Iranian artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh effaced from the walls of his former studio building. Each work was constructed through the layering of marks, traces and textures accumulated over a period of two years. Central to the artist’s visual lexicon is the explorative use of Farsi script and calligraphy that pivots around memory and place, revealing the intricacies of transliteration. Southern Guild also presents new paintings by Cape Town-based artist Manyaku Mashilo. The three newly produced works draw inspiration from historical photographic archives to build self-determined mythological scenes where imagined embodiments of Blackness migrate through abstract liminal spaces. In addition, the gallery presents bronze and hand-blown glass sculptures from Kenyan-born artist Stanislaw Trzebinski’s 2022 solo, ‘Solastalgia’, that imagine the potent and surreal future of a decimated Earth after the extinction of humans. The gallery’s booth features new assemblage-sculpture by Oluseye, a Toronto-based artist born in London and brought up in Lagos. Part of his ongoing ‘Eminado’ series, these works trace and record the movement of the Black diaspora. The talisman-like objects are constructed from debris gathered on the streets of socio-politically significant ‘Black cities’ around the world, combined with rubber, cowry shells, metal parts and synthetic hair. His work finds echoes with the intricately woven tapestries of Patrick Bongoy, whose use of recycled rubber recalls the Belgian colonial-era (and ongoing) brutalisation of the Black body as human capital. Bongoy’s studio operates like a factory in reverse, transforming stockpiles of the industrial material into various states of textile-like plasticity through manual intervention. In addition to the booth in the main section of the fair, Southern Guild will present a fabric work by Jeanne Gaigher in the IN/SITU programme, which features large-scale sculpture and site-specific works installed throughout the hall. Gaigher’s monumental piece, ‘Dimensions of a Dialogue II’, was selected for IN/SITU by Claudia Segura, curator of exhibitions and collections at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in Spain. Made in early 2022 in response to her mediated experience of a spate of natural disasters, the work overwhelms the viewer in scale to mimic the vastness of our uncontrollable environment. Gaigher’s textural works are made through the interlayered use of paint on canvas and semi-transparent scrim. She is intrigued by how natural disasters choreograph the human body in unusual, mournful ways.