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Sound healing performance featuring Southern Guild artists and Patrisse Cullors to mark Los Angeles gallery opening
22 Feb 2024 (3 min) read
South African artists Andile Dyalvane, Sisonke Papu and Nkuthazo Alexis Dyalvane will be joined by New York Times best-selling author, educator, artist, and LA-based abolitionist Patrisse Cullors to participate in a sound healing performance at each of the opening events of Southern Guild Los Angeles.
The Melrose Hill space opens its doors with a private preview on 22 February followed by a public opening on 24 February, marking a significant milestone in the gallery's history.
The sonic healing experience will be a live soundscape in a contained, immersive environment set amongst the towering, monolithic ceramic and bronze works of Zizipho Poswa, drawing on the power of vibrational sound, ancient ritual and modern technology. With its rich focus on the preservation of culture, spirituality, ancestral knowledge and ecology, Southern Guild proposes a moment of pause and healing.
Participants will be invited to witness and experience a traditional African cleansing ceremony involving the burning of imphepo (African sage) and the instrumentation of both the isitolotolo (mouth harp) and udu (Nigerian clay drum). The artists are all experienced practitioners of traditional African spirituality, for whom healing is a calling and a collaborative act of restitution.
The performance will offer a somatic connection in a digital age that has created a chasm between the body and our emotional experience. Most profoundly, with so many parts of the world experiencing violent division and ecological stress, it will awaken a shared sense of purpose and humanity.
“In collaborating with Patrisse Cullors, we are engaging with the LA landscape in an authentically porous manner, while simultaneously highlighting shared concerns that are deeply relevant to the gallery and our artists”, says Southern Guild co-founder Trevyn McGowan.
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS
Patrisse Cullors is the co-founder of the global Black Lives Matter movement and founder of grassroots Los Angeles based organisation Dignity and Power Now. Her work has been featured at The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Frieze LA, The Hammer Museum and Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, among others. She is also the recipient of several awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and Black Woman of the Year Award.
Andile Dyalvane is one of Africa’s foremost ceramic artists. Guided by a deep spiritual connection to his Xhosa ancestors, Dyalvane’s large-scale sculptures are a metaphorical vessel through which he honours his cultural traditions and shares his journey of healing. A member of the International Academy of Ceramics, his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vitra Design Museum, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramic Museum, Iziko South African National Gallery and Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Sisonke Papu is a storyteller and multi-disciplinary artist in Mthatha, Eastern Cape. He also goes by the name KHNYSA, meaning “the one who brings light”, which was given to him by his ancestors upon accepting his spiritual calling to become an igqirha (the isiXhosa designation for someone who has been called by their ancestors to heal). His work explores spatial, emotional and spiritual temporalities by engaging ideas of everydayness, the real and imaginary, dreams and memory, the unseen as well as the mythical, ritual, sonic and cosmic.
Nkuthazo Alexis Dyalvane is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Cape Town, and Andile Dyalvane’s creative partner. Her affinity for the arts runs through her family of musicians, writers, artisans, builders, landscapers and educators. She creatively expresses herself through illustration, writing, clay, silence and sound frequencies while expanding her knowledge of plant and root medicines. “We both have a beautiful relationship with sound, leading to us experimenting with indigenous instrumentation. It’s this that keeps us connected to different types of communities,” says Dyalvane.