Kamyar Bineshtarigh's Group Show honours various artists' studios at Southern Guild

Southern Guild gallery presents Group Show by Kamyar Bineshtarigh, on view from August 21 – November 10, 2025, at their Cape Town location. This marks the Iran-born, South Africa-based artist's second solo exhibition with the art gallery, featuring mixed-media art pieces created using a unique surface transfer technique. At the heart of the showcase lies a deep fascination with the surfaces of different artists' studios—the walls and floors that quietly hold the residues of creative work. Bineshtarigh applies cold glue to walls and floors of various South African artists' studios, then peels off the hardened layer, preserving the paint, plaster and markings on these surfaces. Each piece carries with it both physical materials and an intangible history.

"The series of extractions gives form to Bineshtarigh's curiosity around artists' creative processes, with each work carrying layers of history and energy from its original site—the studio," Southern Guild notes in an official release.

While his earlier 2023 show, 9 Hopkins, was based on the same technique, it centred on the imminent erasure of his own Salt River studio. Group Show shifts the focus to other artists' spaces, allowing their marks and materials to take centre stage. Some of the transfers are rich with visual language: cut-outs from artists Mary Sibande and Lawrence Lemaoana bleed onto grey-white surfaces, while Vusumzi Nkomo's walls hum with printouts of conceptual references and chaotic imagery. Others, like the transfers from Ed Young and Nandipha Mntambo, offer more textural impressions.

The art exhibition includes a broad range of contributions: Alka Dass' cyanotype chemicals leave behind spectral impressions; Andrew Kayser's walls drip with blue abstraction; and transfers from Sibusiso Ngwazi and Thokozani Mthiyane channel the energy of abstract expressionism. One of the show's conceptual anchors is a ritual circle from Imiso Studios, created from cow dung and clay. Its presence in the gallery space emphasises the communal, ancestral and ceremonial aspects of the studio.

"At once archaeological samples, memorials and psychic exposures, the works of Group Show continue Bineshtarigh's enquiry into the potential of these surfaces to still time and preserve history, while also highlighting the social exchange between the art practitioners that is fundamental to the transfer," Southern Gallery says.

Group Show also engages with French artist and painter Daniel Buren's seminal 1979 essay, The Function of the Studio. It blurs the line between the studio and the gallery, challenging the notion that an artwork's meaning is lost when it is removed from its original context. Through this process, Bineshtarigh transforms everyday studio marks, which were not initially intended for exhibition, into artworks in their own right. The contemporary art show is inspired by the concept of disappearance and the fragility of spatial belonging.

"Bineshtarigh's transfers are always motivated by disappearance, their careful preservation of everyday histories betraying an understanding that spatial and geographic belonging is precarious and unstable. It is a great irony that the focus of Group Show—the artist's studio—forces Bineshtarigh out of his own and into a practice far more akin to that of the group show curator," Southern Guild concludes.