Exhibition Details

Southern Guild presents Faces and Phases 19 by Zanele Muholi at its gallery in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles. The solo exhibition celebrates 19 years of Muholi’s seminal photographic project documenting the lives of Black lesbian, bisexual and Queer women, Trans and gender non-conforming people. Initially focused on South Africa, the new series of portraits expands the project’s geography into the US, UK, Brazil and Portugal. This now-historic body of work comprises a collection of close to 1,000 photographs, collectively forming a 'living Queer archive'.
 
 
 
In its many hundreds of gazes, and its embrace of Queer transition, the project is a force of life. Muholi’s ongoing reckoning with histories of violent representation commits itself, in Faces and Phases, to the life work of unconditional Black Queer love: a practice of militant curiosity, care and deep admiration.
Faces and Phases 19 runs concurrently with In Us is Heaven, a group exhibition featuring interdisciplinary artists from Africa and North America exploring the heterogeneity of Queer experience and expression. Coinciding with Los Angeles’ Pride Month, the exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks and events featuring Zanele Muholi and the broader Queer community.