Sir Zanele Muholi presents Faces and Phases 20 during the 61st Venice Biennale

Sir Zanele Muholi will present Faces and Phases 20, an independent off-site exhibition (running from May 5 – 10, 2026) and city-wide activation during the opening of the Venice Biennale 2026. Hosted at the private residence of Trisja Malisoff and Tony Podesta in Venice’s Castello district, the project marks two decades of the South African artist's seminal photographic series, widely regarded as one of the most significant ongoing visual archives of Black LGBTQIA+ lives worldwide.

“The exhibition is conceived as an off-site intervention that activates the city with a powerful South African artistic presence at a moment when the official South African Pavilion has been withdrawn,” Southern Guild notes in the show's official release.

The art exhibition brings together more than 200 black-and-white portraits produced between 2006 and 2026, unfolding across multiple rooms and creating an immersive exhibition that is at once intimate and collective. “The unframed display evokes modes of protest, recalling the immediacy of posters, placards and collectively assembled images, reinforcing the project’s grounding in visual activism. A public-facing banner along the canal extends the work into the fabric of the city, asserting presence and continuity in the face of institutional absence,” the art gallery explains.

Muholi, recently named a laureate of the Hasselblad Award, has long defined their practice as ‘visual activism’, a methodology that reconfigures documentary photography as a collaborative and relational process. Faces and Phases, initiated in 2006, addresses the historical erasure of Black Queer subjectivities by foregrounding dignity, self-representation and collective memory. “Now comprising hundreds of portraits, the series documents participants across time and geography, and affirms what Muholi has described as the necessity of ‘making ourselves visible’ in order to exist within history,” Southern Guild shares.

The contemporary artist’s return to Venice builds on a history of international exhibitions and prior engagements with the Biennale, as well as presentations at leading institutions including Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum and Gropius Bau. In parallel with the contemporary art exhibition, the artist will undertake a mobile photographic activation across Venice from May 6 – 10, 2026.

Drawing on the legacy of studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, Muholi will establish a pop-up studio in public and semi-public sites, producing portraits that are both site-responsive and collaborative. Focusing on members of Venice’s Queer community, particularly Black LGBTQIA+ individuals, the activation extends the scope of Faces and Phases 20 into a new cultural context.

“For each participant, Muholi will produce two Polaroid portraits: one retained for the archive and one gifted to the sitter. This gesture resists extractive image-making, instead foregrounding reciprocity, co-authorship and mutual recognition. The image becomes both document and offering, an ephemeral moment made tangible as a shared keepsake.” Southern Guild shares.