Zizipho Poswa reflects on motherhood with Imbeleko at Southern Guild Cape Town

Southern Guild presents Imbeleko, South African artist Zizipho Poswa’s fifth solo exhibition with the art gallery, on view from February 12 – April 16, 2026, at their Cape Town location. The show features a new collection of earthenware sculptures through which the contemporary artist offers a reflexive meditation on motherhood as both an inherited gift and a shared responsibility. As is characteristic of her practice, Poswa draws from her isiXhosa ancestral lineage, grounding the work in embodied cultural knowledge and matrilineal tradition.

The art exhibition at Southern Guild takes its title from imbeleko, a long-standing isiXhosa post-natal ritual that introduces a newborn child to their ancestors, tethering new life to lineage and land. The term also encompasses ukubeleka—both the act of giving birth and the practice of carrying a baby on one’s back, traditionally secured in a blanket fashioned from the hide of a goat sacrificed during the ceremony. Led by family elders, the ritual includes the burial of the umbilical cord and afterbirth on ancestral ground, symbolically binding the child to heritage and spiritual protection.

“Poswa’s use of the term goes beyond metaphor. It affirms the transmutable power of matrilineal traditions as lived practice, passed through generations of women, and frames imbeleko as a structure of co-creation in which motherhood is understood as both inheritance and responsibility,” the gallery explains in an official release.

The contemporary art exhibition centres on large, rotund, broadly anthropomorphic forms that embody what the artist describes as ‘the body that carries’. “Displayed on waist-height plinths, their scale mirrors the dimensions of the viewer’s own torso, projecting an undeniably relational presence that situates perception as both embodied and visual,” the South Africa-based gallery notes.

“We can’t have a new generation without women who carry, for those who came before and those who will come after,” the sculptural artist reflects. Her commitment to ceramics situates her within a broader lineage of Black women artists whose practices have often been framed through ethnographic or utilitarian lenses.

Poswa’s works complicate entrenched assumptions about women’s labour and the status of craft within material culture. “She reflects intimately on her own maternal experience as embodied, challenging and spiritually transformative. In terms of form, what these new works visualise is the insistence of a social contract among amaXhosa; that the journey of motherhood is not a solitary load to bear. It is a generative labour that unfolds through shared responsibility and inherited knowledge,” Southern Guild notes.

This trajectory builds on earlier bodies of work, notably iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), which marked her 2023 U.S. solo debut and explored umthwalo—the physical and symbolic load carried by amaXhosa women. In Imbeleko, that load shifts from the crown of the head to the front of the body, signalling a subtle yet decisive inflexion in her sculptural language. “Poswa affirms the sanctity of carrying as both offering and inheritance, held in communion with those who came before and those still to come,” Southern Guild states.