THE BMW 7 Series x Manyaku Mashilo x Southern Guild

The intricate lines of Manyaku Mashilo snake their way across the body of the BMW 7 Series in an artwork. The Limpopo-born artist created this special work of art for BMW South Africa in collaboration with Southern Guild. The gallery commissioned Mashilo to translate her paintings into a multi-layered pattern for the vehicle, to commemorate the artist’s solo exhibition, An Order of Being, at the end of 2023.
This short film takes us into Mashilo’s Cape Town studio, where she talks about her process and inspiration. An Order of Being navigates and constructs an imaginative future realm, expansive in its capacity to heal, liberate and reinvent. This new series of figurative paintings is occupied by a collective of fluid, dreamlike figures, constituting a gentle confrontation with the multiplicity of the artist’s past, present and future facets of selfhood.
Mashilo’s practice acts as a vehicle for sense-making; her canvases stand as liminal spaces for synthesising elements of her religious upbringing, ancestral heritage, both real and invented myth, folklore, science fiction, music and sourced archival photographic images.
Music is a vital means to the languaging of Mashilo’s practice. The making of the exhibition’s works was deeply informed by the undulating frequencies of Blues, African gospel, spoken word and free jazz. These sounds invite ritual and a meditative space for free movement. It is this somatic experience, in its spontaneity and distinct capacity to change course, that inspires the flowing contours of Mashilo’s repeated line work. Multiple readings of these contour patterns are possible: the spiralling patterns of human fingerprints, ripples emanating from a central impact point, and the structural co-ordinates of yet-to-be-discovered clusters of stars.
FILM CREDITS:
Director, Cinematographer & Editor: Bill Chen (New Perspective Pictures)
Producer: Erin Starr Katzeff
Original score: Keegan Steenkamp
Sound mixing: Chad Niewenhuis