Southern Guild
21.08 - 10.11.2025

Last year, I had the keys to Brett Seiler’s studio. The artist had packed it up – its paints, bitumens, and woodblocks – for storage ahead of his move to Leipzig, Germany. The studio was empty, save for its walls, which were artworks unto themselves: sketches of sleepers tacked to the wall with masking tape; photographs cut out from magazines and family albums; little poems, little jokes, notes to self – I have so many pictures but so little memories. I had the keys to the studio because my collaborators and I were curating a pop-up exhibition in the space before it passed on to the next renter. Before we could hang, however, we had to help Kamyar Bineshtarigh with a project: over the course of a couple of days, he was to come in with his partner, Alka Dass, cover the walls in cold glue, and peel them off. 

Bineshtarigh came by this method by accident in 2022, when a bit of the glue, which he had integrated into his painting at the time, dripped onto his studio wall. When he peeled it off, a layer of stray inks and pigments came with it. His first museum show, ’Uncover’ at Norval Foundation, was the outcome of this discovery: skins of the studio wall that contained not only the detritus of his practice, but traces of its former life as a clothing factory, which had been abandoned in the 1990s. Bineshtarigh revisited the process for ‘9 Hopkins’, his previous solo at Southern Guild, for which he peeled the walls of the panel beaters who shared the same abandoned factory space: decades of accumulated handprints, footsteps, motor oil spills, and streams of spray paint were salvaged before the building was sold and promptly demolished in 2023.

Brett’s Studio Wall, 2024 was the first in a series of new cold glue works that saw Bineshtarigh venture out of the comforts of his own studio to dig into the pasts of other artists. Over the course of a year, Bineshtarigh and his team visited 24 artist studios across Cape Town and Johannesburg. Each artist was visited three to five times: first for a studio hangout, during which the idea would be proposed; a spot in the studio, selected for its aesthetic intrigue or personal significance, would be mapped for extraction; then the glue would be applied in layers that took a long time to dry, especially in winter, leaving plenty of time for cigarettes to be smoked, jokes exchanged, stories told; finally, working diligently and patiently, the piece would be peeled and then fastened to its hessian backing. 

The result is ‘Group Show’, an exhibition that offers a unique approach not only to art-making, but to art history. There’s Sibu’s Studio Floor, 2025, which is dotted with layers of the abstract painter Sibusiso Ngwazi’s expressive splatters. There’s Vusi’s Studio Wall, 2025, a neat collage of the writer and conceptualist Vusumzi Nkomo’s reference images: Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (1970), Nolan Oswald Dennis’ garden for fanon (2021). 

There’s Alka’s Darkroom Wall III-V, 2025 – blue-hued from the cyanotype solution she uses for the image-transfer portion of her practice – and Mmango’s Studio Wall, 2025,  a lattice of frames leftover from where the canvas once hung.

If the works that we encounter on the walls of galleries, museums, and art fair booths are like photographs, these are their negatives: the plans, maps, to-do lists, ideas, accidents, and experiments on the underside of a life dedicated to making. Nabeeha’s Studio Wall II, 2025, contains a sketch for a future painting alongside a lappie used to wipe paint. Amy’s Studio Wall,2025,  is a multihued collage of colour tests. Brett’s To Do List on His Wall, 2024, contains reminders to clean brushes, take out the trash. 

That so many artists were so generous with these intimate spaces –  such that they willfully and enthusiastically allowed Bineshtarigh to rip off their work, quite literally, and sell it as his own – is what makes the show impressive. See, for example, Mary and Lawrence’s Studio Wall, 2025, which contains fragments of Mary Sibande’s tendrils and scraps of references for Lawrence Lemoana’s textiles, plus some odd bits, like spools of thread and a ceramic chicken foot. As he tells it, for this work in particular, Bineshtarigh gathered what he could find on the floor or table and arranged it on the wall as he saw fit. The couple’s habits of collaboration notwithstanding, the fact that Bineshtarigh once worked for Sibande as a fabricator goes some way to explain their openness in this regard. Indeed, a work like this is testament not only to the trust that Bineshtarigh has earned over time, but the culture of support and exchange that fuels (miraculously so) our provincial little art community down here at the end of the world.

I get emotional when I’m in the room where there are facsimiles of Dominique Cheminais’ and Zander Blom’s studio walls. I have been friends with the couple for some time: Dom and I curated the pop-up show in Brett’s studio, funnily enough; Zander played the organ at my wedding. I have spent many nights in their respective studios, occasionally ruminating on their reference images – Kirchner and Picasso in Dom’s case, architectural photography and children’s colouring book pages in Zander’s – in between cigarettes, shots of tequila, and conversations that lasted until four o’clock in the morning. I remember one such wild evening at the Bloms, at the end of which my companion took a tumble down the stairs. The next day, worried that he may have been suffering from a concussion, I called them. They took us to the hospital and sat outside with me for hours while I waited for him to be discharged. 

I risk sounding like I’m bragging when I tell stories like this – like I’m in with the in-crowd. So too do I risk getting too personal. But that’s exactly the point: art is personal. The art world can be cliquey, commercial, competitive, problematic, toxic – violent, even. These things are true. And yet the art world has brought into my life people like Dom and Zander, people whom I would have never met were it not for the art world, people who have been there for me when I have been sad and scared.

I am especially moved by this when I think about the fact that Bineshtarigh and I are not originally from South Africa. We are outsiders, in a sense. Over the course of fifteen and eight years, respectively, we have made a life for ourselves in Cape Town. Nevertheless, we are far from home. I’m sure that, for Bineshtarigh, that thorn of non-belonging pricks, as it does for me, every now and again. Against a backdrop of long-distance phone calls and egregiously convoluted visa applications, the art world has become, despite the odds, a place to belong. In it, there are some enemies. But mostly, there are friends. Collaborators. Confidantes. Family. 

I return to Brett’s Studio Wall and remember that, as the glue was trying, Kamyar took a dried sunflower – leftover from Brett’s farewell party – as well as a few cigarette butts off the floor and stuck these to the piece. Brett was Kamyar’s teacher when he was a student at Ruth Prowse and, later, became a friend. At the walkabout, he mused about how, once, they got into a heated argument about whether or not Kamyar’s work was romantic. This, he said, in response to a question that Alka asked: “Do you think you’re sentimental?” 

‘Group Show’ is sentimental and is all the better for it, because it captures something about the art world that is almost impossible to describe – impossible because it seems so far-fetched, impossible but, nevertheless, true: the art world is a place where love is.