Southern Guild Presents Transcending Instinct

Southern Guild presents Transcending Instinct, an installation of large-scale seating objects and paintings by Nandipha Mntambo, from 10 February to 8 April 2022. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Transcending Instinct also marks her first venture into functional sculpture.

A multidisciplinary artist who rose to prominence for her cowhide sculptures, Mntambo sees her oeuvre to date as a continuous and interconnected body of work. Collaborating with Southern Guild presented her with the opportunity to explore how key ideas, materials and forms from her archive could be applied to the creation of functional objects. “Lately, my interest lies in re-examining the concept of shape and forms and reflecting on my earlier sculpture and photography, using my current practice as a lens to look back,” says Mntambo.

Each of the four seating objects in Transcending Instinct takes as its departure point a recurring motif or modality from Mntambo’s work. The hunched, rounded or “hump” shape that has appeared and reappeared in various forms over the years (from the hut-like uMcedo sculpture of 2009 to more recent ink drawings and oil paintings) is echoed in a rocking stool adorned with row upon row of hanging leather tassels. The stool’s shape and sense of dynamism and concealment also bring to mind Zangbeto (another recent interest of Mntambo’s), a voodoo spirit regarded by the Ogu or Egun people of Benin as guardians of the night, given physical form through elaborate raffia costumes.

The hump shape is also cited, albeit inverted, in a large bowl-like chair whose rugged leather exterior seem to engulf the sitter. Hidden among the ruffles of leather is another Mntambo motif: folded “ears”, a reference to the Inkunzi Emnyama coat she made using cow ears (2009). The scale and texture of this piece is both cocooning and unsettling – a concave space in which to curl up, aware of one’s corporeality and closeness with the animals whose skins surround you.

The tension between human and animal is perhaps most marked in a zebra-skin chair that began as a sculpture Mntambo made in her studio in Joburg. Its original form, in which the animal appeared to be bucking, has been turned upside down and “tamed” with traditional upholstery springing and various layers of foam cushioning to render its curves comfortable. But this is no slick, sanitized animal-print ‘statement piece’ – the animal’s presence is keenly felt, intentionally manipulated but very much there.

Mntambo’s series of abstract “hair drawings” combining ink and cow hair sewn into paper inspire an oblong timber chaise (carved by Adam Birch), whose sheepskin seat erupts in a profusion of long leather strands. Like the other works, the chaise both holds and obstructs the body.

The origin point for Mntambo’s artmaking has always been the body. Her cowhide sculptures, moulded from her own form, have been described as “vacated second skins” – rigidly preserved in resin but alive with movement. Making sculptural seats brings her full circle, opening up a different terrain by inviting the audience to literally occupy the space of her own body, thus recasting themselves in a way that is at once familiar and wholly unexpected.

Artist Bio

Born in 1982 in Mbabane, Eswatini, Nandipha Mntambo lives and works in Johannesburg. After high school she originally intended to study forensic pathology, but changed course and completed a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007. Mntambo’s acute interest in the human body underlies all her work, which covers sculpture, photography, video and mixed-media works.

Material Value, a solo exhibition of her work was shown at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (2017). Mntambo won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011, for which she produced the national travelling exhibition Faena. She has had held multiple solo shows within South Africa and two at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm (2013-15).

Mntambo featured in the inaugural exhibitions at the Norval Foundation, while other notable group exhibitions include Matereality at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2020); Ngoma: Art and Cosmology at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2019); IncarNations: African Art as Philosophy at the BOZAR Centre for Arts, Brussels (2019); Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2019); Not A Single Story, the Nirox Winter Sculpture Fair in Johannesburg (2018); Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); Afrique Capitales across Paris and Lille (2017); Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at the Seattle Art Museum (2015) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); What Remains is Tomorrow, the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists at the MMK Frankfurt, SCAD Museum of Art and Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC (2014-15); My Joburg at La Maison Rouge, Paris, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2013); 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2012); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); 9th and 12th Dakar Biennales (2010 and 2016); Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009); and Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2008).

Mntambo was shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada in 2014 and was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow for 2013.

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