Southern Guild Returns to RMB Latitudes 2025 with Powerful Dual Artist Presentation

Xanthe Somers: Wearing Thin

Southern Guild will return to RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025 at Shepstone Gardens in Johannesburg with a compelling dual presentation of new work by two distinctive voices in contemporary African art: Xanthe Somers and Terence Maluleke. The presentation affirms the gallery’s continued commitment to narrative-driven, materially innovative practices that challenge and inspire.

Xanthe Somers: Wearing Thin
The 2024 recipient of the ANNA Award, Xanthe created her new series during a Cape Town residency awarded as part of her ANNA Award. Wearing Thin marks an evolution from her 2024 solo show Invisible Hand, which reflected on Zimbabwean basketry and the undervalued labour of women in post-colonial contexts.

Xanthe Somers: Wearing Thin

Her works take the form of braided, vessel-like sculptures whose material tension reflects a state of subtle collapse. Woven clay strands appear untethered in places, forms buckle and bend under their weight, and structural fissures quietly disrupt the surface. This sense of unravelling—both physical and metaphorical—places the work at the edge of endurance.

Somers explores a complex emotional terrain where weaving becomes both metaphor and method, oscillating between cohesion and fracture. “Weaving is about finding commonality,” she explains. “But there’s also violence in being excluded from the narrative.” Wearing Thin inhabits this charged space between resilience and rupture, inviting viewers to reflect on the fragile ties that bind us together—or push us apart.

Terence Maluleke

Terence Maluleke: A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft
In A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft, Terence offers an intimate and unsentimental tribute to the city of his birth. Drawing from memory, observation, and imagination, the Soweto-born artist presents a vivid portrait of Johannesburg as a place of contradiction—chaotic yet creative, improvised yet resilient.

Raised in Soweto and educated in Braamfontein, Maluleke recalls early minibus taxi rides into the city with his mother, captivated by the kinetic energy of the city. “As you arrived in the city, there was a sensation of going inside a humming, moving machine,” he remembers. “There was something enticing about the towering buildings, the buzz, the feeling that really important things took place there.”

Now working from his studio in Doornfontein, Maluleke brings these memories to life through a series of mixed-media paintings that oscillate between private and public moments. In one, lovers cling to each other indoors as orange flares from gunfire burn outside. In another, a pair of hadedas perch atop a stack of plastic chairs, surveying the layered architecture of the city.

Maluleke also addresses the human cost of Johannesburg’s economic margins. A striking portrait of an exhausted zama zama (illegal miner) reflects the harsh realities faced by those navigating the city’s underground economies. Yet even in its grittiest scenes, Maluleke’s palette is bathed in sunlit yellows—evoking both the mine dumps and the promise of something brighter.

With this dual presentation, Southern Guild brings to RMB Latitudes 2025 two artists whose practices offer rich, nuanced perspectives on place, memory, and materiality. Through sculpture and painting, Somers and Maluleke illuminate the forces—seen and unseen—that shape both individual lives and collective experiences.

Southern Guild will be at RMB Latitudes at the Shepstone Gardens in Johannesburg from 21 to 25 May 2025.