The Laying of Hands: Manyaku Mashilo

Southern Guild will present a solo exhibition by contemporary South African artist Manyaku Mashilo at its gallery in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles, opening 13 February, 2025 (until 3 May, 2025). Marking Mashilo’s debut solo in the United States, this deeply resonant body of work reflects on her own experience of coming into womanhood while also addressing themes of African spirituality, memory, community and belonging.

Using an abstracted language of figuration, Mashilo’s mixed-media paintings and sculptural installations pay powerful homage to the indigenous knowledge systems with which she was brought up. Objects and materials imbued with sacred and ritualistic significance feature prominently as motifs, including wooden walking sticks or staffs, mounds of soil, herbs and oils, a traditional hut, and the Ntepa skirt, a garment made from beadwork and animal skin worn by Pedi girls as a symbol of womanhood. The spiritual presence of the artist’s grandmother presides over this body of work, in tribute to her teachings and influence in preserving cultural rituals and practices that are central to the upbringing of children and the journey from girlhood to maturity.

Born in Limpopo province in 1991, Mashilo’s multidimensional practice encompasses mixed-media painting, drawing, collage, film and installation. Her paintings build expansive scenes where imagined representatives of Blackness migrate through abstract liminal spaces. These scenes act as celestial cartographies, connecting the depicted Black figures through a felt mutuality of heritage, spirituality, shared ritual and intent. These migratory figures, forever moving between and through, are driven by an energetic pull toward a new vanguard where purpose and representation can be renegotiated.

Mashilo’s figures are drawn from family photographs, historical imagery depicting various experiences of Black lives and portraits of people from her own community. In this way, Mashilo enmeshes the contemporary and historical as a form of interdimensional mapping. Lineage and memory, both collective and personalised, conflate in this unknown world. Her vast cosmological landscapes offer a multiverse of imagined futures, weaving together place and space, charting a rich and diverse tradition of African spirituality and identity.

Mashilo’s 2023 exhibition at Southern Guild Cape Town, An Order of Being, followed solos at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town and the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, both in 2020. Her work has been featured in Spectrum: On Color and Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Africa Supernova at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, and Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London. Mashilo has also participated in exhibitions at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos, the Javett Centre in Pretoria, Art X Lagos with SMO Contemporary and Unit London.

Her work forms part of the Schulting Art Collection, Pizutti Collection, Hort Family Collection, Tiroche Deleon Collection and The Suzie Wong Collection, as well as private collections in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Korea and United States.

The Laying of Hands by Manyaku Mashilo runs concurrently with Cheick Diallo’s solo retrospective exhibition, Taama.