signifying the impossible song | Group exhibition
Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present signifying the impossible song, an expansive group exhibition curated by Lindsey Raymond and Jana Terblanche bringing together work across diverse media by 17 artists .
Featured artists include Sanford Biggers (USA), Kamyar Bineshtarigh (Iran/South Africa), Patrick Bongoy (DRC), Ange Dakouo (Mali), Bonolo Kavula (South Africa), Nthabiseng Kekana (South Africa), Roméo Mivekannin (Ivory Coast/France), Turiya Magadlela (South Africa), Nandipha Mntambo (Eswatini/South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Oluseye (Nigeria/Canada), Zohra Opoku (Germany/Ghana), Zizipho Poswa (South Africa), Usha Seejarim (South Africa), Inga Somdyala (South Africa), Moffat Takadiwa (Zimbabwe) and Lulama Wolf (South Africa).
'signifying the impossible song' explores the material culture of objects and the protected knowledges they hold. Encompassing mixed-media artworks, found objects, assemblage, photography, sculpture and painting, the exhibition points to the collective unravelling and structural failings of political systems.
Sanford Biggers | Sugar Sell the Pie | 2023
Sanford Biggers | Sugar Sell the Pie | 2023
There are multiple forces in effect – integration and disintegration, defiance and displacement – the cyclical rhythm suggesting the human project as an ongoing process of fabrication and refabrication.
Sanford Biggers | The Cantor | 2022
signifying the impossible song | Installation view
Raymond and Terblanche ask:
“How do you signify an impossible song? What does it mean for choral harmony to be discordant, laboured, flailing? As Carl Adamshick writes in his poem Our Flag, from which the exhibition’s title is drawn, ‘Our flag should be a veil’.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh | Factory Wall VIII | 2022
Patrick Bongoy | CY15 | 2023
How else does one speak to war, famine, inequality, ecological ruin, gender and race injustice, and othering? This is the real – unfathomable, incomplete, endless. Artists and cultural workers graciously assume the perpetual task of representation within an increasingly divisive and violent world. No history, anthology, or census is complete. Similarly, no artistic mission is either.”
Ange Dakouo | Édifice | 2019
Bonolo Kavula | wander | 2024
Bonolo Kavula | wander (detail) | 2024
Representation in art is a form of order, of “organising the world and reality through the act of naming its elements[1]”.
Bonolo Kavula | paradigm shift | 2024
Bonolo Kavula | tender concrete | 2024
An artist’s intuition – the impulse to weave thread into fabric, to extract clay or flora from the ground to shape anew, or to collect and alter materials found across space and time – touches a fundamental human urge to transmute our immediate surroundings to make sense of both present and past.
Bonolo Kavula | divinity | 2024
Bonolo Kavula | novelty | 2024
Conceptual artist Sanford Biggers investigates the conventions of representation, interrupting historical narratives by juxtaposing recognisable cultural symbols. The exhibition includes works from his 'Chimera ' and 'Codex' series, which although distinct in their visual, formal and conceptual languages, both probe the physical and symbolic origins of myth.
Nthabiseng Kekana | Nomkhubulwane (The Great Mother) | 2024
Nthabiseng Kekana | Matebele I | 2024
Biggers reimagines remnants from the past – Classical marble sculptures, traditional African masks and antique American quilts – to call into question their attendant meanings, metaphors and associations.
Nthabiseng Kekana | Matebele III | 2024
Turiya Magadlela | Mpilo Tutu I (Igazi Emlomeni Series) | 2023
While Biggers conceptualises through vast media exploration, Bonolo Kavula hones in on a singular, culturally resonant material: traditional shweshwe cloth, inspired by a dress of her mother’s, now a family heirloom.
Roméo Mivekannin | Bouguereau (The Myth of Orestes) | 2022
Nandipha Mntambo | Dan VII | 2021
Kavula’s near-translucent tapestries are built from tiny cloth discs connected by thread at mathematical intervals into ghostly geometric grids. These abstract meditations, shaped by repeated gestures of care and preservation, are embedded with collective histories of culture and ancestry.
Nandipha Mntambo | Quiet Acts of Affection XIX, Part 2 | 2014
Nandipha Mntambo | Quiet Acts of Affection XIX, Part 2 (detail) | 2014
Within the material worlds that each artist in 'signifying the impossible song' experiences, there are invented worlds that emerge.
Zohra Opoku | ‘All the magic, all the words said against me...' | 2024
Zizipho Poswa | Fang Ndom, Cameroon | 2022
These are based on real events – personal and collective memories of democracy, nationalism, civil protest, social movements, socio-cultural norms, material cultures, language and writing systems – as well as on fictional scenarios, drawing on and reimagining folklore, mythologies, dreams and utopias.
Zizipho Poswa | Fang Ndom, Cameroon (detail) | 2022
Zizipho Poswa | Ga, Ghana | 2022
In Inga Somdyala’s re-interpretation of a failed political covenant, two contending South African flags representing the old and new political orders are resurrected, yet they curve (or slump, wounded) onto the floor.
Zizipho Poswa | Ga, Ghana (detail) | 2022
Usha Seejarim | Receptible | 2022
Together, their colours make up South Africa’s post-1994 national flag – a hopeful, albeit fraught symbol of a unified ‘rainbow nation’ – speaking to what Somdyala describes as the “whimpering conclusion to the Apartheid struggle, where a negotiated peace among the political and economic elite fails to dismantle the fundamentally racist structures within South African society”.
Usha Seejarim | Receptible (detail) | 2022
Usha Seejarim | Crevice | 2021
In Oluseye’s 'Hot Commodity' series, totems of vertically stacked vending machines containing perceived signifiers of Blackness interrogate the facile engagement with Black culture as mere commodity.
Inga Somdyala | Chronicle of a Death Foretold IV | 2023
Inga Somdyala | Chronicle of a Death Foretold V | 2023
The work brings together a range of items and ideas associated with Black people – hair, black-eyed peas, music, cotton and a fictional ‘Black Magic’ detergent – to confront the appropriation and commercialisation of Blackness and Black people in popular culture and the industrial complex.
Inga Somdyala | Blood of the Lamb | 2024
Inga Somdyala | Blood of the Lamb (detail) | 2024
The human need to collect items of spiritual, sentimental and cultural resonance, and surround ourselves with these for comfort and identity-assurance, arises in the materiality of Patrick Bongoy, Ange Dakouo, Turiya Magadlela, Usha Seejarim and Moffat Takadiwa.
Oluseye | Queen Sugar & King Cotton | 2022
Oluseye | Lady Soul | 2022
Assembled materials and objects come into being through the collation of many disparate elements; they remind us that the whole is made up of what was once fragmented. In this way, 'signifying the impossible song' is interested in substrates, the under-layers, what lies beneath and between our perceptions and interactions.
Oluseye | Lady Soul (detail) | 2022
Oluseye | Black Magic | 2022
Seejarim’s 'Receptible' is one such example of this: grass brooms are layered in circular rows to create the form of a pot, conflating the modes of basket-weaving and clay coiling. Abundant and hut-like, her vessel simultaneously evokes African and African-American customs of ‘jumping over the broom’: a marital ritual implementing the new wife’s role to perform service through household labour. The mundane broom transforms into a signifier of projected femininity, domesticity and subservience.
Moffat Takadiwa | Bhiro ne Bepa (pen and paper) | 2023
Moffat Takadiwa | Colonial Product 11 | 2023
The bitter irony of Africa’s natural wealth is engrained in the repurposed materials of Bongoy, Dakouo and Takadiwa. Employed en masse, the detritus of daily life is recirculated into a commentary on the complexities of post-colonial economies forced to put subsistence over ecological preservation.
signifying the impossible song | Installation view
Rubber scraps, toothbrushes, pens, newsprint – their wall reliefs are made from the hangover of past injustices, yet the skillful intervention of the hand exemplifies the ongoing process of rearticulating and rebuilding across the Global South.
Lulama Wolf | Ukhanya Kude (diptych) | 2024
Lulama Wolf | Mzimba Luleka (diptych) | 2024
Towards the end of Adamshick’s poem, the utopian ideal of a unanimous flag has deteriorated. Instead of being an overarching emblem, this flag has been eclipsed by the process of consensus-building itself – open-ended, imperfect, ongoing:
Lulama Wolf | Malambendile lintombi zoMlambo | 2024
Lulama Wolf | Isifuba Sam I | 2024
“Let it be the eloquence
of the process shining
on the page, a beacon
on the edge of a continent.
Let its warnings be dismissed.
Let it be insignificant
and let its insignificance shine.”
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[1] Mitchell, W. 1995, Representation, F Lentricchia & T McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lulama Wolf | Isifuba Sam II | 2024
