Southern Guild spotlights 16 contemporary artists at Frieze London 2026

Southern Guild returns to Frieze London from October  14 – 18, 2026, with a presentation of 16 contemporary artists whose works span painting, photography, sculpture and ceramics. Presented at Booth C1, the showcase “captures a dynamic moment in the gallery’s programme across Africa, Europe and the United States,” Southern Guild notes.

The art exhibition features Adebayo Bolaji, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Sandra Brewster, Amine El Gotaibi, Alex Hedison, Bonolo Kavula, Manyaku Mashilo, Roméo Mivekannin, Gus Monday, Zanele Muholi, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Usha Seejarim, Xanthe Somers, Chidy Wayne and Dominique Zinkpè.

“The presentation foregrounds new and recent work by artists across Southern Guild’s programme, with several making their Frieze London debut with the gallery and others arriving at the fair amid significant institutional exhibitions and milestones,” the art gallery explains.

Highlights include photographs by visual activist Muholi from their Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series, alongside an immense glass-beaded wall hanging that extends their examination of visibility, self-representation and Black identity. Los Angeles-based photographer Hedison presents a series of self-portraits, marking her first showing of new work since the pandemic.

“Using a double-exposure technique, Hedison collapses figure, architecture and landscape within a single image, complicating the boundaries between abstraction and reality,” the contemporary art gallery notes. Brewster similarly unsettles the image by manipulating scale and focus to explore the complexities of representation and how identity is seen and understood.

In painting, Mivekannin revisits canonical works of Western art through large-scale acrylic paintings on black velvet, altering their protagonists and compositions to challenge the authority of established images and the histories they perpetuate. South African artist Nzuza's new oil paintings turn to questions of community and subjectivity, using expressive figuration and colour. A new painting by London-based artist Monday extends his ongoing engagement with architecture and constructed space.

The relationship between everyday materials and larger social structures informs the work of conceptual artist Seejarim, whose sculptural practice transforms domestic objects into forms that examine gender, labour and power. Zimbabwean artist Somers presents glazed stoneware sculptures characterised by elaborate forms, ornament and distortion. Her work interrogates the systems of taste and value that judge objects, exposing their relationship to colonial histories.

Together, the works at Booth C1 demonstrate the breadth of Southern Guild’s programme. The presentation also offers a view into the gallery’s expanding exhibition programme across New York and Cape Town. “Roméo Mivekannin’s Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) will be on view in New York during Frieze London, following Mmangaliso Nzuza’s Ballad of the Peacock and Usha Seejarim’s Used, the two solo exhibitions that inaugurated Southern Guild’s Tribeca gallery in April,” Southern Guild concludes.