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Zanele Muholi: Major Exhibitions and Programmes Across Europe
1 Oct 2026 (6 min) read
This autumn marks a significant period of international recognition for Muholi, with various institutional exhibitions, public programmes, and new projects unfolding across Europe.
Twenty years after Sir Zanele Muholi began Faces and Phases, the landmark portrait project is entering a new chapter. What began in South Africa in 2006 as a response to the absence and erasure of Black LGBTQIA+ lives from visual and historical records has grown into an expansive, living archive spanning hundreds of portraits, multiple continents and generations. This autumn, that sustained commitment to visibility, self-representation and collective memory is being recognised through a remarkable concentration of exhibitions and programmes across Europe.
The season builds on several years of major institutional presentations. Muholi’s survey at Tate Modern in London brought together more than 260 photographs spanning their career, before travelling to the Serralves Museum in Porto, where more than 200 photographs marked the first major presentation of their work in Portugal and the final iteration of an exhibition that had travelled through institutions including Gropius Bau, Berlin; Bildmuseet, Umeå; IVAM, Valencia; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. In 2026, Southern Guild collaborated with Muholi on Faces and Phases 20, an independent presentation of more than 200 portraits during the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale, followed by Kanye Nawe (With You) at Southern Guild Cape Town, spanning more than two decades of photography, moving image, and sculpture.
For Southern Guild, these presentations have particular resonance. Our work with Muholi has increasingly centred on creating space for the full breadth of their practice while supporting the continued life of Faces and Phases beyond the gallery: as an archive built through relationships, an evolving record of Black Queer lives, and a project that continues to generate new encounters and communities. Its twentieth anniversary is therefore not simply an occasion to look back, but to consider how a body of work conceived against erasure continues to grow, travel, and enter the historical record.
We Are Here at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN
That trajectory continues in Vienna with Zanele Muholi: We Are Here, now on view at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN until 10 January 2027. Muholi’s first solo exhibition in Austria, the expansive presentation brings together more than 120 photographs alongside video works and archival material spanning over two decades.
The exhibition moves between landmark bodies of work including Only Half the Picture, Being, Faces and Phases, and Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), tracing the interconnected concerns that have shaped Muholi’s practice: who is seen, who controls representation, whose histories are preserved, and who remains absent from the archive.
Crucially, We Are Here does not position this history as complete. Community engagement is embedded in the exhibition’s programme through discussions, workshops, screenings and collaborations with Queer organisations in Vienna. As curator Marit Lena Herrmann observes, community has shaped Muholi’s work for more than two decades: the images reveal inequality while also demonstrating “the power of togetherness and the healing that comes from this sense of community.”
The exhibition opened alongside a conversation between Muholi and curator, writer, and scholar Renée Mussai around the newly published third volume of Faces and Phases. Muholi’s own description of the project distils what is at stake: “This is not art; this is life. Each and every photograph is someone’s biography.”
Published by MACK to mark the project’s twentieth anniversary, Faces and Phases: 2006–2026 brings together more than 300 largely unpublished photographs alongside interviews, essays, and testimonies. It reinforces what has always distinguished the series: individual portraits accumulate into a collective archive, but the individuality and agency of each participant remain fundamental.
The 2026 Hasselblad Award
The significance of this moment comes into even sharper focus in October, when Muholi formally receives the 2026 Hasselblad Award in Gothenburg. The Hasselblad Foundation describes Muholi as “one of the most influential contemporary photographers, with an impact that reaches far beyond the art world,” recognising a practice in which formal achievement, activism and community-building are inseparable.
Muholi, characteristically, locates the significance of the award beyond individual achievement: “This prize is not mine alone. I carry it with the many faces, names, and histories that have trusted me with their stories.”
The statement returns the recognition to the people whose presence has made the work possible. Twenty years after Faces and Phases began, the Hasselblad Award acknowledges not only Muholi’s influence on contemporary photography, but the significance of the alternative visual history they have built with Black LGBTQIA+ communities in South Africa and around the world.
Hasselblad Award Week begins in Gothenburg on 8 October with The Mechanisms of Exclusion, a seminar opening with an artist talk by Muholi and expanding into questions around photography, archives, representation, and democracy. That evening, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra will perform a concert in Muholi’s honour, ahead of the formal award ceremony on 9 October.
The accompanying Zanele Muholi: Hasselblad Award 2026 exhibition opens at the Hasselblad Center on 10 October 2026 and remains on view until 4 April 2027. Muholi will lead the opening public tour, followed by a launch and signing of Faces and Phases: 2006–2026. The exhibition and programme create an unusually substantial context around the award: one that considers Muholi’s photographs not in isolation, but alongside the histories, relationships, and structures of visibility that have shaped their making.
Faces and Phases continues in Stockholm
During a residency in Stockholm, Muholi is working with Black lesbian, bisexual, and Queer women, as well as transgender and gender non-conforming participants from the city’s LGBTQI+ community, to create a new group of portraits. These photographs will form a Stockholm iteration of Faces and Phases, presented at Eva Livijn Art Space in October.
The project is significant because Faces and Phases has never been conceived of as a fixed archive. It grows through encounter, return, and sustained relationships with the people photographed. Participants enter the archive at different moments in their lives; some return to Muholi’s camera over many years. As the project moves into new geographies, its history expands with them.
Twenty years on, the archive therefore remains resolutely in the present. The new Stockholm portraits connect individual lives in the city to a project that began in South Africa while resisting the idea that Black Queer experience can be contained by a single geography, generation or historical moment.
In conversation at Moderna Museet
Muholi’s time in Sweden culminates on 13 October with an artist talk at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, presented as part of Hasselblad Award Week. The programme also includes a lecture by curator Tawanda Appiah inspired by Muholi’s practice.
Seen together, Muholi’s achievements in Vienna, Gothenburg, and Stockholm represent more than a sequence of European engagements. They arrive at a pivotal point in a practice built through continuity; now entering its third decade of returning to the people, questions, and responsibilities at the heart of Faces and Phases, while continually expanding the forms through which Muholi explores selfhood, intimacy, memory, and collective presence.
From Faces and Phases 20 in Venice and Kanye Nawe in Cape Town to this autumn’s exhibitions and programmes across Europe, the throughline is not simply Muholi’s growing institutional presence. It is the increasing visibility of the lives, histories, and collective archive that their practice has insisted belong within the history of photography all along.