Driftwork at Southern Guild

Driftwork (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Southern Guild.

Gazing through the gallery window, I was met by an expanse of soft, atmospheric yellow. Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s Lagoons and Lagoons and Lagoons (2021), measuring 12 feet across, stretched across the entrance wall, its suspended sheet displaying inked faces. Blue thread ran from black lips, peaking and falling across the width of the piece, stretching toward pools of cerulean and indigo lines on the other side. Cutting through the gallery’s stillness came a steady thwack, thwack— the sound of double-dutch ropes striking the floor somewhere out of view. Turning the corner to follow the sound, my eye caught the lower left corner of Ogunji’s lagoons, where the phrase “You catch up with yourself” was stitched.

In Driftwork, Southern Guild’s final exhibition in Los Angeles, curated by Essence Harden, memory operated as both material and method. In this convening of 11 African, Caribbean, and Afro-disaporic artists —including Zalika Azim, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Sandra Brewster, Janiva Ellis, Sidony O’Neal, Anique Jordan, Shaniqwa Jarvis, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, among others—memory was rendered visible. Fragments of personal and collective histories surfaced through rope, textile, photography, and paint, demonstrating how remnants gain power by activating and transforming one another.

The works dwell on what Édouard Glissant describes as relation:¹ a space where selfhood is not singular but multiple, layered through migration, rupture, and entanglement. The artists in Driftwork position remnants as connective tissue, revealing diasporic identity as something continually shaped through accumulation, proximity, and exchange.

One of the show’s most arresting presences was Zalika Azim’s sculptural installation, Ascension Device II (actions for earth…or some other oscillation…a haptic and sonic engagement…a breath…or an architecture for gathering between space and time) (2024). Spanning nearly 23 feet across the center of the main gallery, doubledutch ropes trace a wide, continuous arc between two towering wooden structures. The repetition of the ropes’ movement fills the gallery with familiar, kinetic percussion. Azim extracts the movement of double-dutch and reconstitutes it as sculpture, allowing its syncopated timing to endure as an ongoing temporal structure within the gallery. This rhythm reverberates, conjuring a felt sense of communal inheritance that registers in the body and, like the looping sound, has the potential to continue indefinitely.

Driftwork (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Southern Guild.

Across the wall of the gallery’s second room, three sculptural figures from Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s Revisiting Belisario: Sketches of Character series (ongoing) were imposingly wall-mounted. Their dark textured bodies, two made of PVC, sleek and precise, are studded with screws and bolts. The PVC figures and the burnt wood figure all have portruding forms—an elongated wooden orb streaked with gold leaf and etched like exposed grain, a web of bronze wire, a sculpted sea of vibrant macaw feathers laden with a gold-railed wire boat of small, dark anatomical hearts. These assemblages, including bronze, calabash, silk cord, plexiglass, wood elements, function simultaneously as artefacts and icons, objects that document and consecrate. In Thomas-Girvan’s hands, fragments gathered as ritual elements carry ancestral knowledge forward, their accumulation a record of both what persists and what has been lost.

In contrast, Shaniqwa Jarvis’s work turns towards the interior. Just inside the gallery entrance, sat Don’t Forget Us (2025). The work features a wooden dresser and bench, anchoring a circular mirror draped in a sheer, black fabric printed with blurred tones of pink, yellow, and green, like a photograph exposed too soon. The dresser conjures the ritual of getting ready: smoothing hair, lining perfume bottles, tucking photographs into the mirror’s edge. The vanity itself, a family heirloom passed down through three generations of Jarvis’s maternal line, operates as a remnant carrying lineage into the present. The draped silk disrupts the mirror’s promise of a clear reflection, fracturing it into a surface that holds absence and possibility in equal measure.

Ogunji’s expansive works on architectural tracing paper extend across luminous yellow grounds, their surfaces layered with ink, collage, graphite, and thread. In The Atlantic The Atlantic (2024), an 80-x-120-inch composition assembled from two sheets hung side by side, spiraling fields of indigo and black arc across the thin paper like a whirlpool. Eyes cut into the paper reveal small, colorfully stitched faces, while strands of thread fall beyond the paper’s edge. The work captures the residue of thoughts and feelings in conversation—made visible, left unresolved.

At a panel presentation at the gallery, Harden described the recently-opened exhibition as unfinished—still in its making. This declaration can frame the entire project: Driftwork is process. Its progression from communal, to ancestral, to personal revealed a curatorial vision both exacting and generous. In the exhibition, diasporic selfhood unfolded as Glissant describes: formed in the ongoing entanglement of lives across time and distance, sustained through absence, transformation, and the ever-renewed act of turning back.

Though Southern Guild retains its Cape Town home, the show carried the poignancy of its departure from Los Angeles. That this gathering, so attuned to echoes, fragments, and the familiar interiors of Black life, should mark an ending felt unbearably tender. Driftwork assembled what we did not know we had forgotten and surfaced it with care. The exhibition became a trace within the city’s art ecology, a meditation on disappearance. It revealed relation itself as a generative force, a site where diasporic voices remain distinct and alive.

Even in departure, something persists. If, as Harden suggests, this exhibition is in process, it is because the work of holding these voices in conversation, of surfacing what has been lost and refusing to let it settle, cannot end here. To move through Driftwork was to feel what happens when these traces converge: a current passes between the works and the body. The show demonstrated that identity can be reconstituted through and beyond rupture, that across difference and distance, we find each other anyway, and must. Being in relation is itself the practice. A transmission that does not explain but makes itself felt.

Driftwork (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and Southern Guild.

Nneka Jackson is a writer, cultural strategist, and attorney working at the intersection of intellectual property, creative economies, and cultural equity. She collaborates with artists and cultural organizations to develop frameworks that support creative practice and cultural infrastructure. Her writing engages diasporic memory, identity, folklore, and radical possibility.

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