Southern Guild
29.05 - 13.08.2025

The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into darkness.— John Fante (ASK THE DUST)

Yet, inside Southern Guild’s exhibition, that vision was momentarily suspended. We were transported to the Elysian fields, boundaries dissolved, and we were one with all things. It’s a July winter morning, and I arrived late because I was not sure if I should take an Uber or taxi. I decided to take a taxi – a chance to read Erich Neaumann’s book ‘The Great Mother’. I crossed the steel white Foreshore bridge and strolled to the Silo District. It doesn’t matter that I am late because after I shoot a text to my sister, Simthandile, she notifies me she will be here in four minutes. I have to risk social engagement alone, and there is the usual art crowd who make me conscious of my lack of style. We are all gathered here for a VIP brunch and a curator walkabout with Erin Starr Katzeff.

The exhibition Thresholds creates a liminal space, where diverse artistic approaches dissolve our separatist relationship with the earth. Within this space, Thresholds asks how the hieros gamos, or sacred union of opposites, might symbolize the bond between humans and land. In Amine El Gotaibi’s Until Light Emerges, this connection is made tangible through Mandala form. The work depicts a full moon, representing wholeness—a process in which unconscious components merge with consciousness. The piece appears as white soot coated on rusted bronze steel, with a charcoal ring outlining its edges.

The moon as a symbol is particularly compelling. Its gravity attracts the ocean’s waves—the ocean itself a metaphor for the unconscious—and it appears both by day and night, existing between two worlds. Yet, like the darker aspects of humanity’s relationship to the earth, marked by conquest, domination and oppression, this moon carries deep and eternal darkness around its edges. 

There are 18 selected artists in the exhibition and present at the event, including Simphiwe Buthelezi, Patrick Bongoy and Belinda Blignaut – one of those days when one feels present and hours pass in a blink of an eye. But still, there is enough time to exchange pleasantries with old and new friends.

I run into a former colleague, Michael Jacobs from our time at Zeitz MOCAA, who now works at the Silo Hotel. He expresses that he feels that Buthelezi’s work, Mlosi, is the thing that holds the exhibition together. His words linger, and as I look closer, I realise why: to describe Mlosi in plain terms would miss its force. It asks to be spoken of in the language of origins.

The artwork shows us reeds, beads, sand, but the work itself calls for another register — one closer to myth and cosmology, because it evokes a time before borders, before language.

Feel the world in its vastness: a prehistoric sphere turning silently in space—the artist’s spirit embodied. She emerged from the reeds and brought forth all that exists: mountains, rivers, animals, and people. Three hundred thousand years ago, she taught the Zulu how to hunt, how to make fire, and how to cultivate the land. She is considered the First Woman, present in everything she created. Look at how the reeds have been uprooted, cut, dried, and fused into a desert-like landscape. One can imagine these reeds pressed against fingers, forced to twist and bend together. The reeds remember. They recall the singing riverbeds where they once danced. Now, they erupt and flow across the surface of the artwork, clustering along the edges like a hundred matchsticks seeking flame. See her—sand slipping from her fingers, beads spilling like raindrops between them. Think of the drowned ancestors beneath ocean currents. Beads, like embers, scatter along the shore, still humming—like a thousand golden and brown crabs emerging from salt and sand. Some are wet, others dry. Some lift into swirling clouds. See our planet before our time.  Buthelezi’s Mlosi is prehistoric, primordial—like the Earth before borders, before language. It is becoming a world: forming continents, nurturing cultures, giving rise to communities, and announcing the birth of something altogether new. See it, too, after our time.

I collide with another piece I like, but for different reasons. In Patrick Bongoy’s The Big Catch, I see black rubber that has been cut into strips and stitched together as if using glue; spokes poke out as if it has been nailed to the wall. One looks at it and sees a space into which the imagination does not want to enter. This is not its natural state, because it holds secrets of its origins, and even now, it appears that it wants to be something else, as if it is fighting against its current form. I wrestled with the piece a lot and with the complicated roads it leads us to. In this artwork, the rubber’s scent suggests decay in nature and industry. It also breaks down the ego’s view of an alchemical process meant for solid earth minerals, not plant life. 

Its particular genesis began with the cutting of a tree, allowing its latex to bleed into a bowl. Through coagulation with formic acid and water, then pressed through rollers, the latex is dried, smoked, and, like colonized African people, rubber is christened into its blackening. The rubber is stripped, twisted, and shaped into black-hole wind: a mountain, a raven’s wing, or blacked-out pages. However, this transformation does not erase its origins; traces and desires still live within its charred bark—for forests, for rainfall, for changing seasons. It refuses to disintegrate. Instead, it twists and turns on the gallery wall, seeking to speak of the firmament, of spirit as force, as a state opposite to the known, as death and rebirth—Nigredo, the great alchemical work that leads to integration and higher consciousness. According to American psychologist James Hillman, this is the great transformation that Joseph Conrad feared.

In Thero Makepe’s self-portrait Sharpville Hero, the artist stands in a field of grass. Behind him, a wall bears the words Sharpville Medical Centre. Trash is scattered around a tree, beneath a clear blue sky. Historical effects are layered onto the ordinary—or perhaps it is the other way around. Maybe it is not meant to be clear. The artist, dressed in a black suit with the blazer slung over his shoulder, could have just stepped out of church at 11 a.m., or perhaps the photograph captures him on his way to a job interview. The image evokes the tension between aspiration and assimilation. Yet, as we confront the gaze of this figure—the hometown hero—I am reminded of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, since both works depict a steadfast figure grappling with the contradictions of history.

But consider it next to Lulama Wolf’s Unombo, which draws from endosomatic perceptions to depict a white figure giving birth to a black one. It’s a potent idea—to give birth to oneself—a visual metaphor for discovering the unconscious components of not just the personal, but the collective psyche. Here, the artist channels the very subject of Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother, tracing historical archetypes of the feminine. This creates a dual metaphor within the exhibition: the Great Mother is mother earth herself, who births humanity, and this same archetype is projected onto real-life women.

This projection is made more explicit in Rochelle Webster Nembhard and Gemma Shepherd’s photographs, in which a woman stands nude, her hair tied down with rocks, her body painted a bronze colour. She depicts the literal and psychological weight of these archetypes as they are projected onto women—capturing both their light (creative, life-giving) and their shadow (burdensome, restrictive) forms.

Simtha and I exit the gallery, and people mill about outside with unfinished white wine glasses, and someone rolls tobacco. Simtha asks me in which direction I intend to go. I tell her I am going to walk to town, and we walk together. One of her favourite pieces is Blignaut’s Vessel for Navigating the Dark, a striking ochre sculpture that looks like a vase slowly dissolving. On closer inspection, traces of Blignaut’s fingers remain. Clay, the prima materia of all creation, is transformed here through water and fire into a vessel—somewhere between a vase and a city of burning bodies—each form suggesting an inner figure of the artist’s psyche. At times, it even resembles rusted metal, blurring the line between inside and outside and reshaping how we think about the earth.

The work reflects how shaping something outside yourself mirrors the inner process of self-formation. Clay is something most of us used as children, though we sculpted cows and sheep rather than exploring what was inside. This piece materialises the inner world and challenges aesthetic ideals, asking us to reconsider what can be considered beautiful.

There’s a sense of a mass grave, of ancestors, but some forms look like rusted nails, as if being crushed. It evokes a changing brain, pain, and fingers pressing into something—reminders of how we are constantly shaped. It also recalls history and the forward march of time.

Shaped by the artist, the clay loses its softness but keeps its form. It exists in two states at once—soft yet hard, wet yet dry—and hangs between beginning and end, between calcination and dissolution, as if Blignaut is still in the process of making it.