Expo Chicago 2024

Southern Guild returns to Expo Chicago for its second consecutive year with a presentation of new and recent work by leading artists from Africa and its diaspora. The gallery’s booth at the 2024 edition of the fair will debut figurative paintings by first-time exhibitors Terence Maluleke (South Africa) and Ayotunde Ojo (Nigeria), alongside work by Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Manyaku Mashilo (South Africa) and Patrick Bongoy (DRC).

Southern Guild’s inaugural participation in the fair last year was met with a resoundingly warm reception, with a series of collaborations forging connections between its artists and their counterparts in Chicago’s African-American community. The Cape Town-based gallery has since expanded to the United States with a 5,000-sqft space now open in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles, giving it a permanent platform to build on its core values of cultural exchange and meaningful engagement.

Southern Guild’s booth at Expo Chicago encompasses painting, photography and three-dimensional work. Diverse in subject matter and approach, the work on show leans towards the spiritual, locating the sacred in solitude, community, artistic labour, repose, sacrifice and the elevation of the everyday.

Highlights of Southern Guild’s booth:

• Lagos-based artist Ayotunde Ojo’s diptych painting, Michael Reading II, is a deliberate and necessary call to pause. Depicting figures at rest in a palette of muted colours, Ojo’s work exudes a quiet and restrained elegance. Ojo came to painting during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the four years since, he has taken part in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, Lagos, Abidjan and Zaventem, Belgium. Earlier this year, he completed a six-week stay at the gallery’s GUILD Residency in Cape Town, during which this work was created. He currently has work in Mother Tongues, Southern Guild Los Angeles’ inaugural group exhibition, and was included in Southern Guild’s presentation at the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
• South African artist Terence Maluleke debuts new paintings exploring Christian iconography from the perspective of a Black man. With their devotional subject matter, angular distillations of shape and earthy tones, these works signal a new direction that will inform his upcoming solo at Southern Guild Los Angeles in July 2024. Maluleke’s stylised figurative paintings draw inspiration from the township community of Soweto in which he grew up. He was selected by curators Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu for the Generations section at the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, for which he created a body of work in response to historic tapestries from the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre.
• Patrick Bongoy, who was recently selected as a finalist in the 2024 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize, exhibits an intricate, sculptural wall-hanging made from thousands of pieces of repurposed rubber. Bongoy’s labour-intensive works speak to the search for hope amidst the ongoing economic and human exploitation in his native DRC. Made from waste materials such as inner tubes from vehicle tyres, industrial packaging, hessian sacking and discarded textiles, his woven tapestries are a visual metaphor for the continued abuses the Congolese people have suffered at the hands of systemic imperial structures.
• South African artist Manyaku Mashilo’s arched canvases depict fluid, dream-like figures occupying a celestial landscape that reaches into the past and the future. In addition to works made especially for the fair, two of the paintings formed part of her recent solo at Southern Guild Cape Town, An Order of Being. Mashilo’s practice acts as a vehicle for sense-making, synthesising elements of her religious upbringing, ancestral heritage and contemporary interests. Her work is currently featured in Mother Tongues, the group exhibition at Southern Guild Los Angeles, and was recently part of Spectrum: On Color and Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.
• South African ceramic sculptor Zizipho Poswa presents a glazed earthenware sculpture, Mam'uNoHotile, from a series paying homage to the matriarchs of the artist’s rural village. Poswa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. Her current solo exhibition, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), at Southern Guild Los Angeles comprises five colossal ceramic and bronze sculptures which were produced during a summer-long residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach in 2023.
• Cape Town-based Iranian artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh exhibits ink-on-canvas works from his Khat-Khati series (a Farsi phrase loosely translated as ‘scratch’ or ‘scribble’). 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 work is published in Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art (Phaidon Press, New York, 2023), and was recently selected by critic/curator Sean O’Toole for the SOLO Section at the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair. His 2021 body of work Koples Boek(e) won the 2024 Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Best Emerging Artist / Curator from South Africa’s National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Bineshtarigh currently has work featured in Mother Tongues at Southern Guild Los Angeles.
• Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist Oluseye presents his Blackbodybag photographic series documenting a performance in which he responds to the rise in incidents of police brutality against Black men globally, but in particular, in the US. Inspired by the ritualistic dance of Yoruba Egungun masquerades, the artist breathes life into a refuse bag – a symbol of death and discard – imbuing the everyday with spiritual transcendence. Oluseye has held two solos since participating in last year’s Expo Chicago – Black Exodus: Summer Departure at Southern Guild Cape Town and the follow-up Black Exodus: Winter Arrival at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto. He currently has work included in Mother Tongues at Southern Guild Los Angeles and Unruly Navigations at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (until 1 September, 2024).
• South African visual activist Zanele Muholi exhibits photographic self-portraits from their acclaimed Somnyama Ngonyama series. Muholi’s various iterations of self are a profound declaration of their life-long commitment to decolonise canonical representations of Black, queer and female bodies, and to document the lives of Black LGBTQI+ communities. Muholi’s self-titled solo exhibition at Southern Guild Cape Town in 2023 will be followed by a second solo at Southern Guild Los Angeles, opening on 11 May 2024. The artist’s first major exhibition on the US’s West Coast, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, is currently on show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) until 11 August 2024.