On 12 February 2026, on the eve of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Southern Guild in Cape Town opened Imbeleko, a formidable new solo exhibition of sculptural forms by Zizipho Poswa. Marking her fifth solo show with the gallery, the presentation reasserts her stature as one of the continent’s most compelling voices working in clay, offering a profound meditation on the power of motherhood as an inherited gift.
The exhibition’s title refers to a long-standing isiXhosa ritual: a post-natal ceremony performed to introduce a child to their ancestors, symbolically tethering a new soul to those who came before. More expansively, imbeleko encompasses ukubeleka — both the act of giving birth and the practice of carrying a baby on one’s back.
Led by family elders, the ritual involves the burial of the umbilical cord on ancestral ground, a gesture connecting the child to land, lineage, and spiritual protection. Zizipho’s use of the term therefore goes beyond metaphor; it affirms the transmutable power of matrilineal traditions as a lived practice, framing motherhood as both inheritance and shared responsibility.
Zizipho’s new series of large earthenware sculptures translates this cosmology into monumental form. Shaping rotund, broadly anthropomorphic forms from clay, she imbues them with a sturdy tenderness. Each work bears an organic structure that protrudes outward, poetically resembling “the body that carries”.
Displayed on waist-height plinths, their scale mirrors the viewer’s own torso, establishing a relational presence that situates perception as both embodied and visual.
With this series, Zizipho is informed by personal and collective narratives that reframe mothering as a shared load. As she remarked from her Cape Town studio: “We can’t have a new generation without women who carry, for those who came before and those who will come after.” The works give form to what is often carried without recognition: the physical, spiritual, and ancestral labour that sustains life.
While Zizipho’s mastery of material remains ever-present, Imbeleko marks a decisive inflection point in her practice. Where earlier bodies of work, such as her 2023 series iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), engaged outward expressions of Xhosa heritage, this new collection turns inward, considering the maternal journey as an embodied, interior process. The emphasis shifts from the visible performance of carrying to the intimate conditions that make it possible.
This turn does not relinquish the communal; rather, it deepens it. Motherhood is articulated not as an isolated experience, but as shared custodianship — a generative responsibility shaped through lineage, inherited practice, and bodily knowledge.
In rendering this knowledge monumental, Zizipho affirms the sanctity of carrying as both offering and inheritance, held in communion with those who came before and those still to come.
