Frieze London 2026

Capturing a dynamic moment in the gallery’s programme across Africa, Europe, and the United States, the 2026 presentation spans painting, photography, sculpture, and ceramics, with works by 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.

New and recent work by artists across Southern Guild’s programme will be foregrounded, with several making their Frieze London debut with the gallery and others arriving at the fair amid significant institutional exhibitions and milestones. Across disciplines, familiar subjects and materials are amplified, obscured, fragmented, and reconfigured, inviting shifts in how they are seen and understood.

Highlights include new works by Zanele Muholi, internationally acclaimed visual activist and recipient of the 2026 Hasselblad Award. The presentation includes photography from their world-renowned series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) and an immense glass-beaded wall hanging, coinciding with major European institutional exhibitions at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg and Foto Arsenal Wien in Vienna. Marking the first time she has shown new work since the pandemic, Los Angeles-based photographer Alex Hedison premieres a series of self-portraits that continue her longstanding exploration of the space between defined places. Using a double-exposure technique, Hedison collapses figure, architecture, and landscape within a single image, complicating the boundaries between abstraction and reality.

Sandra Brewster’s photo-based practice manipulates scale, focus, and surface to explore the instability of the photographic image and the ways identity is perceived; while large-scale acrylic paintings on black velvet by Beninese-French artist Roméo Mivekannin revisit canonical works of
Western art, altering their protagonists and compositions to question the authority of established images. New oil-on-canvas painting by South African artist Mmangaliso Nzuza continues his exploration of community and subjectivity through an expressive figurative language shaped by colour, gesture, and psychological interiority.

Material and technical process take on different roles in works by Amine El Gotaibi and Bonolo Kavula. El Gotaibi juxtaposes corten steel and wool, drawing on the landscapes, architectures, and artisanal traditions of Morocco and North Africa, while Kavula transforms punched discs of Shweshwe fabric into suspended geometric compositions, transforming a textile with complex cultural and colonial histories into something newly abstract, fragile, and spatial. South African conceptual artist Usha Seejarim’s transformation of everyday domestic objects into sculptural forms examines the intersections of gender, labour, and power. The inclusion of her clothespin assemblage work at Frieze London coincides with the unveiling of her permanent public memorial in Bremen and solo exhibition at Gerhard-Marcks-Haus.

The presentation also features glazed stoneware sculptures by Zimbabwean artist and 2026 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize finalist Xanthe Somers, whose elaborate ceramic forms use ornament, excess and distortion to examine systems of taste and value shaped by colonial histories. Works from the Pugnatores series by Barcelona-based artist Chidy Wayne reduce the human figure to a spare, graphic vocabulary, using the archetype of the fighter to consider masculinity, conflict, and the tension between physical strength and interior struggle. A new painting by London-based British-South African artist Gus Monday draws on his ongoing engagement with architecture and constructed space, translating architectural references through a distinctly painterly lens.

With several participating artists appearing across Southern Guild’s exhibition programme in New York and Cape Town, the Frieze presentation offers a timely view into the gallery’s programme across both cities. 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. Amine El Gotaibi and Chidy Wayne open concurrent solos in New York on 6 November, followed by Bonolo Kavula’s Malome in Cape Town on 19 November. Kamyar Bineshtarigh will present a solo exhibition in New York in March 2027.