Genius ceramic artist Zizipho Poswa does it again with Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty)
Southern Guild will open its new gallery in Los Angeles next month with a dual presentation: Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), a solo exhibition by South Africa’s Zizipho Poswa (pictured above), and Mother Tongues, a group exhibition featuring 25 artists from the continent.
If like us, you are super fans and loved Zizipho Poswa’s uBuhle boKhokho, which we featured here, then no doubt, you will love this new volume of work and her inaugural solo exhibition at Southern Guild’s new gallery in Los Angeles 22 February – 18 April 2024.
Indyebo yakwaNtu is Poswa’s most ambitious technical undertaking to date, comprising five colossal ceramic and bronze sculptures reaching heights of over 8 feet tall. The clay bodies were produced during her summer-long residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics (CCC) at California State University Long Beach, where Poswa had access to the center’s immense kilns.
In this new body of work, Poswa consciously upscales objects of African beautification and ritual. Precious metal jewellery, beadwork, hair combs and pins made by master artisans across the continent are emulated as bronze-cast elements resting atop vast ceramic silos, revering and immortalising the valued positions these amulets hold.
Translated from Xhosa, “indyebo” literally refers to material riches but more broadly encompasses the cultural, economic, intellectual and spiritual wealth of Africans. “Ntu” is the spirit that defines and gives impetus – an embodiment of the identity, consciousness and life purposes of African beings. Indyebo yakwaNtu is, therefore, a fulfillment of Poswa’s ancestral mission to celebrate both the natural and self-producing beauty of the continent.
Her approach in this work is distinctly Pan-African: “Drawing on Africa’s own mineral wealth, her people have created an immeasurable creative collection from which African men and women adorn themselves, resulting in a language of objects that has come to shape our identity,” Poswa says.
Tracing traditional customs
With their bronze crowns, this series of sculptures stands as a praise song to early African civilisations. Poswa traces the traditional healing customs, polytheistic practices and cosmological knowledge of her amaXhosa culture to its Kemetic heritage.
The influence of the Nubian kingdom – rich in gold, ivory and ebony – spread along the Nile from Eqypt to Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia and through trade routes, human migration and nomadic cultures to the Swahili civilisation in Mozambique, the Sahara of Northern Africa, and the Southern African region where Poswa finds her home.
In Akan, a large square crest with filigreed pattern accentuates the beauty of the lapis lazuli- blue clay body beneath it. Modelled on a bead adornment worn by the Asantehemaa (the queen mother of the Asante people), this piece celebrates the authoritative positions women held in the Akan Kingdom’s dual-gender system of chieftaincy. Asante queen mothers commanded soldiers in war, engaged in politics, occupied chiefs’ stools, played senior advisory roles and resolved disputes in courts. (According to B.J Stoeltje in “Asante Queen Mothers in Ghana”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History 2021)
In another work, the Lobi people who settled in Burkina Faso are recalled through a majestic bronze reproduction of an ornate brass hairpin design. In a piece titled Fulani, the earrings traditionally worn by the Fulani women in West Africa, northern regions of Central Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, and near the Red Sea coast are emulated through sensuously enveloping swathes of bronze. Historically, these finely forged gold earrings served as a symbol of social standing, with their size indicating societal status or economic wealth.
Elsewhere, a “cisakulo” comb of the Chokwe from what is now Mozambique depicts an Ngungu bird, a symbol of strong leadership. Closer to home, Poswa references the Xhosa “isacholo” bracelet in an arc of four large spheres representing the white beads these are made of.
This work “celebrates the heritage of the people who birthed me,” explains Poswa. Understood to hold healing properties, the isacholo is worn mainly by elderly Xhosa women as it is believed to alleviate blood circulation and bone-related ailments. In Xhosa culture, white beads symbolise purity, clarity and mediation.
Today, they are still used as spiritual offerings worn by “amagqirha”, divine traditional healers, when communicating with the ancestors. In Poswa’s ceramic totem, beautification extends beyond the decorative to become a tool for spiritual resonance.
Indyebo yakwaNtu is an anthropological excavation that weaves together the socio-cultural and spiritual elements that underpin African creation.”
Often passed through generations of women as family heirlooms, jewelry’s importance surpasses its material value to encompass cultural, geographic, sentimental and matrilineal significance.
Indyebo yakwaNtu extends Poswa’s artistic practice of homage to crowns worn by African women, which have previously included braided hairstyles and loads of water, firewood and produce carried on the heads of women across the rural Eastern Cape. These monumental works revel in the transformative power of beauty – following on from Poswa’s acclaimed series Umthwalo (isiXhosa word for ‘load’), iLobola (customary dowry) and uBuhle boKhokho (Beauty of Our Ancestors) – honouring the community of women who raised her, while looking elsewhere to the continent for inspirational offerings.
“I am inspired by conscious design,” Poswa says, “Indyebo yakwaNtu is therefore an anthropological excavation that weaves together the socio-cultural and spiritual elements that underpin African creation.”
Who is Zizipho Poswa
Zizipho Poswa is a Cape Town-based artist whose large-scale, hand-coiled sculptures are bold declarations of African womanhood. Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha, Poswa was raised in the nearby village of Holela in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. She graduated from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology with a degree in surface design and in 2005, she and fellow ceramicist Andile Dyalvane opened their studio, Imiso (meaning “tomorrow”) Ceramics.
Since 2017, Poswa’s oeuvre for Southern Guild has straddled figuration and abstraction, employing an intuitive vocabulary of form, colour and texture. Her work is a deep invocation of her personal journey and an homage to the spiritual traditions and matriarchal stewardship of her Xhosa culture.
She has held three solo exhibitions to date: iLobola (2021) and uBuhle boKhokho (2022), both at Southern Guild in Cape Town, and iiNtsika zeSizwe at Galerie56 in New York.
Poswa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the LOEWE Foundation, as well as important private and corporate collections around the world. She has taken part in group exhibitions at Marian Ibrahim (Chicago), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (Perth), and other galleries in New York, Paris, Hamburg and Liverpool.
ForIndyebo yakwaNtu,she worked under the guidance and apprenticeship of renowned American ceramic artist Tony Marsh, co-founder and inaugural director of the CCC, which functions as an influential hub for expanded discourse and advanced creative production in the West Coast ceramics community. Poswa joins the more than 200 artists from 20 countries who have been invited guests at the centre.
Established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild represents contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. With a focus on Africa’s rich tradition of utilitarian and ritualistic art, the gallery’s programme furthers the continent’s contribution to global art movements. Southern Guild’s artists explore the preservation of culture, spirituality, identity, ancestral knowledge, and ecology within the continent’s landscape.
Some of their work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Mint Museum, Harn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Vitra Museum, Design Museum Gent and National Gallery of Victoria.
Since 2018, the Southern Guild has collaborated with BMW South Africa on a year-round programme of meaningful activations that promote artist development and propel their careers.
“I am inspired by conscious design…Indyebo yakwaNtu is therefore an anthropological excavation that weaves together the socio-cultural and spiritual elements that underpin African creation.”
