Frieze London 2025

Committed to amplifying progressive contemporary practices from the African continent and its diaspora, Southern Guild’s presentation brings together important new works by artists Zanele Muholi, Zizipho Poswa,
Bonolo Kavula, Manyaku Mashilo, Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Roméo Mivekannin, and marks the gallery’s first time presenting the work of New York-based artist Chloe Chiasson and Spanish-Guinean painter Chidy Wayne at a fair.

Following presentations at Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles earlier this year, Southern Guild’s participation in the London edition signals the expansion of the gallery’s fair programme and honours its sustained commitment to positioning culturally resonant voices within contemporary global discourse. The gallery will re-introduce London audiences to the work of Poswa and Muholi, who each had a sculpture selected by curator Fatoş Üstek for last year’s Frieze Sculpture, the fair’s public art initiative installed in the park’s historic English Gardens.

Southern Guild’s Frieze London presentation focuses on strong, women artists whose diverse practices explore the intersections of gender identity, sexuality, race and class, and seek to honour the memory and contribution of their matrilineal forebears. The booth includes several monumental and large-scale works, and foregrounds non-traditional approaches to materiality, with many of the artists exploring new techniques.

Highlights include:

Frieze London marks the first time Zanele Muholi’s work will be shown in London since their major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2024. Well-known for their prize-winning photographic oeuvre, the visual activist broadens their formal and technical exploration with two colossal photographic murals on aluminium, a transgressive sculpture and a newly released lightbox series. A highlight of the Muholi works is an expansive hand-beaded wall hanging. Depicting aerial landscape photographs captured by the artist through airplane windows during their extensive travels, the expansive panel is abstracted into prismatic fragments and rendered in intricately strung swathes of glass beads. Here, travel functions as both subject and methodology, an essential ritual in the building of Muholi’s nomadic, transnational archive of selfhood and Queer being. The South African visual activist expands on their compelling manifesto of visibility for the Black, non-binary body with a pair of self-portraits from their seminal Somnyama Ngonyama series printed on to aluminium. Standing over seven feet tall, The Protector sculpture realises the image of Muholi as icon and sanctuary. Cloaked in flowing robes, hands clasped in prayer, the
figure dramatically recentres the Black, Queer body within a sacred visual canon.

Zizipho Poswa unveils a new ceramic sculpture in her Umthwalo series, in which a cluster of orblike forms rest upon a vertical clay body marked with rich, textured striations of glaze. Hand-coiled and built to commanding scale, her works stand in tribute to the matriarchal stewardship within Xhosa culture, calling to mind both the intimacy of domestic ritual and the architectural presence of monument. Poswa’s intuitive vocabulary of shape and colour is a celebration of ancestral practices of hair-braiding, women’s labour and spiritual ceremony. Her forthcoming solo at Southern Guild Cape Town in February 2026 follows recent acquisitions by institutions including Die Neue Sammlung in München, Germany, as well as inclusion in group exhibitions at The Soloviev Foundation Gallery in New York and Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.

Manyaku Mashilo debuts figurative canvases that construct otherworldly terrains where ancestral lineage and speculative futurity converge. Cloaked in red ochre, her figures, at once celestial and rooted, inhabit cosmic realms that collapse boundaries of past, present and future. In dialogue with Kavula’s ritual constellations and Muholi’s self-projections, Mashilo’s work envisions her subjects as expansive and oriented toward a reimagined self-determination. The artist made her debut in the United States earlier this year with a solo exhibition, The Laying of Hands, at Southern Guild Los Angeles. She presented a mixed-media, outdoor installation at the 2025 Stellenbosch Triennial in South Africa, signalling an expanding interest in indigenous architecture and the built environment.

A two-and-a-half-metre, multi-panel textile work sees Bonolo Kavula venture further into three dimensionality. Informed by line, colour, repetition and light, Kavula’s work is defined by minimalist abstraction, rooted in the cultural and material realities of Southern Africa. Through a rigorous
process of punching, cutting and assembling minute discs of Shweshwe fabric onto vast grids of thread, she creates translucent constellations that preserve intimate familial memory. Prompted by the early inheritance of a Shweshwe dress once belonging to her mother, her use of the material carries the weight of matrilineal inheritance. Winner of the 2023 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize, Kavula most recently had work featured in signifying the impossible song at Southern Guild Los Angeles and Tearing, Punching, Squeezing, Drilling at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art
in London.

Recent works by American artist Chloe Chiasson explore the tension between intimacy and spectacle, mobilising traditional symbols of Americana as layered backdrops for Queer visibility and desire. Chiasson’s process combines painting, carpentry and found objects in defiance of traditional distinctions between fine art and craft. Born and raised in Texas and now based in Brooklyn, New York, she invites viewers to inhabit the intersectional, dimensional theatre of Queer life, where fragments of personal memory expand into broad reflections on identity, desire and
belonging. In 2023, Chiasson was awarded the Fountainhead Residency and presented her first solo institutional exhibition, Keep Left at the Fork, at Dallas Contemporary. Her work was featured in Southern Guild Los Angeles’ recent group exhibition, In Us is Heaven.

A series of new paintings on black velvet by multidisciplinary artist Roméo Mivekannin (Ivory Coast/Benin) challenge the Western art canon with the insertion of his own self-portrait into works by John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper. Mivekannin incorporates archival material to expose
the Eurocentric gaze, basing his work on the “memory of history” – literally and figuratively. He began experimenting with painting on velvet for Black Mirror, his 2025 solo exhibition at Collezione Maramotti in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, drawn by the fabric’s extraordinary capacity to absorb colour and light. Mivekannin will hold his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany
at Kunsthalle Giessen this November. Earlier this year he participated in group exhibitions including When We See Us at Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels and Kings and Queens of Africa: Forms and Figures of Power at Louvre Abu-Dhabi.

Presenting a series of semi-figurative works, Chidy Wayne manipulates form to explore the body’s expressive thresholds. Rendered through sweeping brushstrokes and charcoal across his canvases, gesture becomes a visceral language of liberation. The series follows the figure of the fighter or “pugnator” (combatant in Latin) through three essential moments: reflection before the battle, action at the heart of the fight, and finally, victory. These three scenes aim to tell not only a physical story, but an inner journey: doubt, effort, and triumph. Wayne has held solo exhibitions in Brussels, Barcelona, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Miami, among others.