Southern Guild gallery debuts at Paris Photo with an all-women presentation

Southern Guild will make its debut at Paris Photo, on view from November 11 – 15, 2026, with works by four women artists whose practices challenge the conventions of photography and expand its conceptual possibilities. Bringing together Sandra Brewster, Lebohang Kganye, Zanele Muholi and Silvia Rosi, the presentation will take place in the art fair’s curated Voices sector at the Grand Palais, Paris, under the theme La Disparition (Disappearance), and will be curated by Zasha Colah and Francesco Zanot.

“Moving between staged photography, archival reconstruction, textile and experimental photographic processes, the four artists unsettle the photograph's presumed authority as a faithful record. Their work opens up the space between presence and absence, documentation and invention, revealing how photographic images can be materially and conceptually reconstituted,” Southern Guild explains.

For Kganye, the family archive becomes a site of reconstruction. “Drawing on inherited photographs, oral histories and personal narratives, the South African artist’s practice moves between photography, performance, sculpture and textile, challenging the photograph's apparent fixity and proposing memory as an active process of storytelling,” the art gallery notes. Her works on display include Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, Le Sale ka Kgotso and Mosebetsi wa Dirithi, tracing an evolving investigation into memory, home and representation.

“Extracting individual figures from family photographs and removing their original backgrounds, Kganye reconstructs them as life-sized, stitched collages of cut-out cotton twill, monumentalising ancestral likenesses against expanses of negative space,” the gallery adds.

Italian-Togolese artist Rosi draws on familial histories, using performative self-portraiture and the visual language of West African studio photography to explore cultural inheritance and diasporic identity. “In Encounter, Rosi assumes the roles of her parents, reconstructing scenes through fragments of familial memory. In Disintegrata, the image itself undergoes fragmentation and dissolution, evoking the precariousness of cultural inheritance and the shifting relationship between the body and its representation,” the contemporary art gallery notes.

Brewster's ongoing Blur series challenges photography's traditional association with clarity and permanence. Through slow-shutter portraiture and a tactile gel-transfer process, she produces fragmented images in which faces and identities appear in states of flux, reflecting the experience of migration. “The resulting portraits resist photography's historical association with clarity and legibility, their fragmented, fugitive quality reflecting the layered and continually evolving experience of diasporic identity that informs Brewster's practice as a Canadian artist of Guyanese heritage,” the gallery explains.

Meanwhile, South Africa-based visual activist Muholi brings photography into the realm of visual activism and self-determination. Their celebrated Somnyama Ngonyama series uses performative self-portraiture to confront histories of racial representation and reclaim visibility for Black LGBTQIA+ communities. Two works presented in Paris draw connections between Cape Town and Los Angeles. “Mlingani II, District Six, Cape Town (2025), photographed in a neighbourhood still marked by the forced removal of Black communities under apartheid, and Khanyilanga III, Koreatown, Los Angeles (2024), made in an enclave shaped by successive waves of migration,” the gallery shares.

Southern Guild's Paris Photo debut follows its participation in Frieze London and the opening of its permanent New York gallery in Tribeca in April 2026. “The all-women presentation affirms the vital contribution of artists whose work continues to reshape photography's visual language and challenge its established canon,” Southern Guild notes.