Cape Town-based artist Zizipho Poswa opens her fifth solo exhibition with Southern Guild, Imbeleko, on February 12, just ahead of the 13th Investec Cape Town Art Fair. With this new body of work, Poswa turns her attention to motherhood, lineage, and the quiet, generational labour carried by women, themes she has been exploring across her large-scale ceramic sculptures since co-founding Imiso Ceramics in 2005 with fellow artist Andile Dyalvane.
Born in 1979 in Mthatha, Eastern Cape, Poswa studied surface design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and, over the last two decades, has become known for her bold, anthropomorphic totems. Her work straddles figuration and abstraction, combining elliptical forms and vivid colours to create sculptures that are at once deeply personal and rooted in Xhosa matriarchal traditions.
Imbeleko is anchored in her isiXhosa heritage, drawing on the eponymous ritual: a post-natal ceremony that introduces a child to their ancestors and symbolically tethers new life to lineage and land. The term also encompasses ukubeleka, the act of carrying a child on one’s back, traditionally wrapped in a blanket crafted from the skin of a goat sacrificed during the ceremony. Poswa’s use of the term is not metaphorical alone; it positions motherhood as inherited, shared, and active labour, a responsibility and a gift passed down through generations of women.
In this exhibition, her new earthenware sculptures give form to the unseen and often unrecognised work of mothering. The voluminous bases cradle other shapes, binding weight to the body rather than balancing it above the head, a subtle yet powerful shift from her earlier series iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation) (2023, New York), where women bore symbolic loads atop their heads. Here, the load is intimate, interior, and embodied, emphasising care as shared rather than solitary.
Poswa’s ongoing exploration of material and form draws on both personal experience and collective narratives. She reflects on the journey of motherhood as a continuum: informed by lineage and women who came before and preparing the way for those still to come. Her practice has always been attentive to the intersection of ritual, spirituality, and aesthetic form, from iLobola (2021), which mapped the stages of the bride-wealth negotiation through sculptural allegory, to uBuhle boKhokho, which reimagined historic and contemporary African hairstyles through photography and sculpture, situating herself within an intergenerational network of black women affirming self-defined standards of beauty.
The exhibition sits within a broader, international trajectory. Poswa’s work is held in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Loewe Foundation and has been featured in group shows across Los Angeles, Paris, Milan, Singapore, and beyond. Yet, even amid global recognition, her practice remains anchored in the communal and spiritual frameworks of her culture.
Seen within the arc of her work, Imbeleko represents both a return and a new direction. It revisits familiar concerns such as matrilineal knowledge, ritual, and the sanctity of care while turning inward, exploring motherhood as lived, felt, and shared labour.
Imbeleko opens on Thursday, February 12, and will be on show at Southern Guild Cape Town until April 16.
