Southern Guild: New additions

Introducing several monumental bronze sculptures and new additions to the award-winning photographic series Somnyama Ngonyama, Southern Guild is proud to present Zanele Muholi’s self-titled autobiographical exhibition at the gallery from 15 June to 17 August.

“The exhibition is in part a response to South Africa’s ongoing femicide, the stigmatisation of LGBTQI+ communities and the proliferation of gender-based violence, especially the ‘curative’ or ‘corrective’ rape of Black lesbians,” explains the gallery.

“It interrogates social, political and biomedical practices and conditioning that has placed women, girls, and non-binary female bodies in conflict with their physical bodies,” adds curatorial advisor Beathur Mgoza Baker.

“Central to their exploration is re-focussing women and audiences generally around the importance of their reproductive and sexual rights and autonomy.”

As such, the exhibition aims to portray the pain and ecstasy of existing in a Black, queer female body through pieces exclusively influenced by and based on the artist’s life, with the uterus as a signature motif throughout.

“The uterus is my signature, it is the rite of passage that is common to all of us regardless of race, class, gender. It is a common space, it is like water – water is water, blood is blood, the womb is the womb, birth is birth. You are born from someone, you come from that passage. Whether you come from a big house, a small house, rich or poor, I think the womb becomes the common space. It is the original leveller. Where do we come from? What does this nine-month journey have to do with all of us? Only when we have respected this, can we start to think about sexual pleasures and choice. The narrative is not limited to being a mother, but rather, what it means to be a bleeding human being or to have once bled. What does it mean for a woman not to bleed, and the stigma attached to that? People ask me, ‘How is your uterus art?’ It is the deification of this, to raise it and give it the honour that it deserves so that it is not just for women,” explains the artist.