Poswa and Muholi’s works will be included alongside art by 22 leading international artists sited throughout the park’s historic English Gardens. Frieze Sculpture coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which take place concurrently in The Regent’s Park (9-13 October).
Curated by Fatoş Üstek, the exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive public programme of live activations and curator-led tours. Frieze Sculpture is part of London Sculpture Week, a city-wide collaboration that also includes the Fourth Plinth, Sculpture in the City and The Line.
Forming part of Poswa’s most ambitious technical undertaking to date, Lobi (2024) is a colossal ceramic and bronze sculpture measuring over 8 feet tall. It comprises a monumental ceramic body made up of individual spherical forms supporting a heraldic bronze crest – a larger-than-life reproduction of an ornate brass hairpin worn by the Lobi people, who settled in the area that is now Burkina Faso.
The clay body was produced during a Summer 2023 residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach where Poswa had access to the centre’s immense kilns, enabling her to explore scaling up in a significant way. Lobi formed part of her most recent body of work, ‘Indyebo yakwaNtu’ (Black Bounty), exhibited at Southern Guild Los Angeles earlier this year, which referenced Pan African traditions of bodily adornment and precious metal jewellery. Often passed through generations of women as family heirlooms, jewellery’s importance surpasses its material value to encompass cultural, geographic, sentimental and matrilineal significance. In Poswa’s sculptural totem, beautification transcends beyond the decorative to become a tool for spiritual resonance.
Bambatha I carries a wider political resonance, too: The work was created after the artist learned about two victims of gender-based violence, whose bodies were discovered not far from their home in Durban. The suffocating entanglement is a visceral evocation of pain and anguish at the ongoing prevalence of femicide and violent hate crimes in South Africa. It was originally shown in Muholi’s eponymous solos at Southern Guild’s Cape Town and Los Angeles galleries in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
In the exhibitions, the artist called for new rites of self-expression, sexuality, mothering and healing that usher in kinder modes of survival in our contemporary world. With self portraiture as its predominant mode, Muholi’s work presents a personal reckoning with themes including sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, gender-based violence and the resultant trauma, pain and loss, sexual rights, and biomedical education. The artist’s three-dimensional expansion into bronze honours and commemorates Black women and LGBTQI+ individuals’ contributions to art, politics, medical sciences and culture.
Press release courtesy of Southern Guild
