Southern Guild amplifies African voices in contemporary art at Art Basel Miami Beach

Southern Guild makes its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, which runs from December 3 – 7, 2025, signalling a new chapter for the Cape Town and Los Angeles–based art gallery. “Founded nearly two decades ago on the principles of collaboration and cultural preservation, the gallery has become a vanguard for progressive contemporary voices from Africa and its diaspora,” Southern Guild notes in an official release. Its inaugural appearance at Art Basel Miami Beach follows a year of significant global momentum, including lauded first-time presentations at Frieze Los Angeles, Frieze New York and Frieze London.

At the art fair’s Booth B10, the gallery presents painting, sculpture art and photography by a multi-generational roster of artists whose practices probe race, gender, economic inequality, spiritual cosmologies and decolonial futures. The presentation features several artists, including Zanele Muholi, Roméo Mivekannin, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Zizipho Poswa, Chloe Chiasson, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Dominique Zinkpè, Ayotunde Ojo, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Manyaku Mashilo, Usha Seejarim, Nandipha Mntambo, Bonolo Kavula and Amine El Gotaibi.

At the art festival, African artist Muholi’s new photographic works extend her celebrated Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series into new material forms. Chiasson’s work, on the other hand, merges painting, collage and assemblage to reimagine narratives of the American South, crafting counter-mythologies of Queer domesticity. Rhapsody Murray similarly intervenes in symbols of American machismo, using the car as an ephemeral vehicle for memory, lineage and aspiration.

Addressing the afterlives of the ethnographic gaze, Mivekannin and Ojo offer divergent strategies of figuration. Based between France and Benin, Mivekannin inserts his own likeness into canonical Western portraits to subvert art-historical narratives. Nigeria-based Ojo, by contrast, presents quieter scenes of domestic introspection, where subjects reclaim psychological and spiritual agency through the subtle intimacy of everyday life. Speculative futures anchored in tradition underpin Mashilo’s large-scale Afrofuturist diptych, which traces matrilineal knowledge within her Sepedi heritage. Leslie Singleton, on the other hand, contributes narrative scenes that explore the multiplicity of Black and Queer experience—its tenderness, ecstasies and contradictions.

The Iran and South Africa-based artist Bineshtarigh’s Brett’s Studio Wall, extracted from more than twenty feet of a fellow artist’s studio surface, operates as a layered palimpsest of cold glue, paint, ghosted script and incidental debris. Johannesburg-based Seejarim reconfigures wooden clothes pegs into poetic sculptural assemblages that elevate domestic ritual and unseen care economies. A new steel-and-wool wall sculpture by El Gotaibi explores tensions between nature and society through the lens of North African identity, while Poswa’s monumental bronze and ceramic Isacholo (nearly ten feet tall) magnifies the form of a traditional Xhosa healing bracelet. In dialogue, Zinkpè’s bronze totem, cast from an original timber carving, channels Vodun cosmologies into contemporary art forms.

“Southern Guild’s presentation affirms the gallery’s sustained commitment to amplifying the visibility and critical discourse of resonant African voices. The fair marks a moment of curatorial and creative fruition, a culmination of years dedicated to asserting a singular and compelling vision within the global contemporary field,” concludes the gallery established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan.