Walking through the winding hallways and nooks of Strangers House gallery in Mumbai, with its peeling wallpaper and domestic furnishings, a visitor might understandably mistake the photographs and art lining its walls for a personal collection, rather like framed images from an old family album. This impression is bolstered by the everyday scenes many of the photographs capture—children frowning in a family photo, friends grinning and leaning into one another for the camera, a photoshoot of a young man in various outfits and angles. This everyday quality is the political force behind the new exhibition The Cairo Road, which showcases the work of visual artists from Zambia in collaboration with the Everyday Lusaka gallery and its founder, Sana Ginwalla. The show features reproductions of works by the Zambian photographer Alick Phiri and contemporary art by digital artist Maingaila Muvundika, multimedia artist Daudi M. Yves, painter Kalinosi Mutale, paintings and found object sculptures by Lawrence Chikwa and photographs by Ginwalla. The title of the exhibition, The Cairo Road, refers to the street that is Lusaka’s main artery; it also calls attention to the roads running parallel to it: Chachacha Road, where Indian traders settled and where the Fine Art Studio—the first photo studio in Lusaka catering to Black clients—still stands, and Freedom Way, where Black communities lived.

Photography has often been instrumentalised as a tool to alienate, stereotype and marginalise oppressed groups, including in colonial anthropology.

Now 77, Phiri began working and training in 1965 under Prabhubhai Vilas, the Indian founder of Fine Art Studios. At a time when photography equipment, knowledge and access were controlled by the white British population, his photographs were a rare look into the everyday lives of local Black communities, a counter to a fetishistic anthropological gaze. His practice extends from the 1960s to the 1990s, across colonial times, the struggle for independence from the British Empire, the founding of the Republic of Zambia in 1964 and its journey to establish a national identity. In 1983, Phiri opened the Kwacha Photo Studio in Kanyama, Lusaka.

Photography has often been instrumentalised as a tool to alienate, stereotype and marginalise oppressed groups, including in colonial anthropology. Black theorists like W. E. B. Du Bois have described the psychological challenge marginalised Black communities face as a result of viewing themselves through the eyes of a white-dominant culture. Phiri’s self-portraits, then, serve as a radical assertion of subjecthood and selfhood. In scenes from his photographs, three stylish youths pose in a huddle outside a watch repair shop, a woman wearing a dress and high heels sits on a chair, looking into the camera; babies and toddlers are seen solo and in happy family portraits.

Phiri's photographs are often made on the street, outside a house or cafe, grounding subjects in their home environments and implying rich, busy lives stretching beyond the captured moment. In celebrating ordinary Lusakans and their everyday lives, Phiri challenges the form of the documentary image and historical record, inscribing value to people and moments that are overlooked or erased for their supposed lack of significance.

The archive of Fine Art Studios was preserved and digitised by Sana Ginwalla, a Zambian-Indian photographer and curator, beginning in 2018 as part of the Zambia Belonging archive. The Manjarpatta fabric used to reproduce the works for the exhibition in Mumbai was spun by Anappa Kamble in the town of Ichalkaranji; it interweaves India’s post-independence economy with the story of Lusaka. Ginwalla’s photographs, which depict fashionable young people from Lusaka’s Indian community striking poses in their homes, are on view on the gallery’s second floor.

Conceptual artist Maingaila Muvundika, also from Lusaka, presents a contemporary take on portraiture—incorporating digital art technology like collage and printmaking—to damage, blur and distress photographs. Works from Lawrence Chikwa’s multimedia art series, Double Standards, allude to traditional African masks, rendered on paper and in wood for Dream Readers, in which scrap metal wire is used to form features. These masks are nodes of connection allowing generations of Africans to speak to each other and to interrogate ideas of legacy, migration and sovereign culture.

In bold, confrontational yellow and black, contemporary artist Daudi M. Yves explores displacement, migration and its effects on identity. The Commuter, a digital print on canvas, depicts a young black man in a car, surrounded by a collage of newsprint, household documents and legal paperwork, reflecting the banal complexities of migration. Long Live depicts independence leader Patrice Lumumba (in oil and charcoal on bright yellow fabric) leaning against a street sign bearing his name, an anchor of strength during a time of upheaval. Zambian artist Kalinosi Victor Mutale’s print works use ‘Kalidraw’—an invented language of abstract forms inspired by African mythology to disturb and unfix language and its instrumentalisation by systems of power, leaving in its place a ‘21st-century global script’.

Each act in the exhibition's conception—the collection of African art and photography stretching from 1965 to the present day, Ginwalla's preservation of photo studio archives, the curators' assemblage of visual art and photographs, its transcontinental journey and reproduction in India—comes together to form a counter-archive, overwriting colonial narratives. The Cairo Road returns the colonial gaze with one of its own—politically charged yet intimate, grounded in community and solidarity, in the nature of its transmission.

‘The Cairo Road’ will be on view at Strangers House gallery in Colaba, Mumbai, from July 10 - September 12, 2025.