Frieze Los Angeles 2025

The presentation features specially commissioned works by artists from South Africa and the United States, including a new lightbox and large-scale wallpaper print from Zanele Muholi’s seminal series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), two monumental ceramic and bronze sculptures by Zizipho Poswa, paintings by Manyaku Mashilo, photographic prints by Alex Hedison and textile works by Bonolo Kavula.

Southern Guild is the only gallery from the African continent participating in Frieze LA, and the only one from South Africa to have a permanent gallery in the US. Founded in Cape Town in 2008, Southern Guild made a new home in Los Angeles with the opening of its gallery in Melrose Hill in February 2024. In the wake of the devastating wildfires, the gallery stands in solidarity with the art community and city as a whole.

“We approach the one-year anniversary of our Los Angeles expansion with a commitment to showcasing our artists’ practices to US audiences and to deepening the cross-continental ties we have established,” says Trevyn McGowan, co-founder of Southern Guild with her husband, Julian. Southern Guild’s 2025 programme in LA opens with two solo exhibitions, Taama by Malian design pioneer Cheick Diallo and The Laying of Hands by multidisciplinary South African artist Manyaku Mashilo, running concurrently between 13 February and 3 May, 2025.

“Over the past year we have built relationships of authentic exchange with collectors, partner galleries, curators, and artists in the States and have begun to explore showing the work of American artists such as Alex Hedison,” McGowan adds.

Community, memory, lineage and loss are themes common to all five of the women artists Southern Guild presents at Frieze LA. Whether working in abstract or figurative modes, their practices address the reinvention of self and reclamation of heritage. They locate the sacred in the mundane, and through careful observation and the repetitive act of making and remaking, they give vivid form to previously underrepresented spaces, symbols and subjects.

Highlights at Frieze LA:

A selection of photographic works from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series includes a new lightbox and wallpaper print measuring almost 10 feet (3 metres) high. This ongoing body of work stands as an expanding archive of intimate, Queer representation through the act of self-portraiture. Begun in 2012, the black-and-white series presents Muholi as a shifting vessel for different characters and archetypes. Impromptu and nomadic, the portraits employ quotidian objects beyond their primary functions, echoing a deeper disruption within the artist’s practice as a whole. Somnyama Ngonyama is iconoclastic in its documentation of Muholi’s changing form, responding to the near-invisibility of Black women and non-binary bodies as subjects of representation in the history of Western painting and portraiture prior to the 20th century.

Muholi’s participation at Frieze LA coincides with the opening of major solo exhibitions at the Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paulo on 22 February and at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah on 25 February, followed by a survey at Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal in April 2025. In addition, Southern Guild Los Angeles will present a new solo exhibition in May 2025, which will expand on the visual activist’s ongoing Faces and Phases photographic series, documenting new participants from Los Angeles, London, Sao Paolo and Porto. The new LA portraits were taken during Muholi’s two-month artist residency at the Hammer Museum in November 2024.

A ceramic sculpture emblazoned with bronze horns by Zizipho Poswa, commissioned especially for Frieze LA, honours the matrilineal heritage and spiritual traditions of the artist’s Xhosa culture. Reaching a height of almost six feet, the work pays homage to the spiritual offering underlying the age-old African custom of lobola (bride-wealth) – the cow. The gallery will also show a monumental ceramic and bronze totem from Poswa’s most ambitious body of work to date, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), celebrating African traditions of bodily adornment and ornamentation. Produced while she was a resident artist at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics, California State University, Long Beach in Summer 2023, the work comprises a massive ceramic drum crested with a bronze panel modelled on the historic design of an Asante bead. Titled Akan after the group that the Asante kingdom formed part of, the sculpture memorializes the power that women embodied in the chieftancy’s dual-gender system of governance. A pair of Poswa’s ceramic sculptures is currently featured alongside a photographic work by Muholi in Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened on 15 December and will run until 3 August, 2025.

New paintings in acrylic, ink and red ochre by Manyaku Mashilo trace the matrilineal transfer of knowledge in her own family and Sepedi culture. Her canvases invoke the objects, teachings and rituals passed down as guiding forces and depict women expansively taking up space, poised and attentive in their pursuit of reinvention. The paintings form part of Mashilo’s latest body of work, The Laying of Hands, at Southern Guild Los Angeles from 13 February to 3 May, 2025, her first solo exhibition in the United States. Clay features prominently in this body of work, inspired by the koma coming-of-age ceremony for young Sepedi women. Mashilo’s larger-than-life figures are cloaked in red paint mixed with ochre, echoing the application of letsoku, a vivid paste of red ochre mixed with clay and animal fat, smeared on young women’s bodies as they enter this sacred period under the guidance of matriarchs. Born and raised in Limpopo, the artist grew up witnessing this rite of passage, but left her birth home before experiencing it herself. The Laying of Hands conjures her own circle of caretakers and confidantes as she navigates her path as a mother and artist living and working in Cape Town. Mashilo will present a mixed-media, outdoor installation at the 2025 Stellenbosch Triennial in South Africa (19 February – 30 April), signalling the expansion of her practice as she explores her interest in indigenous architecture and the built environment.

A prescient photographic work from Alex Hedison’s series, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, records the mercurial terrain beneath the Malibu Beach houses where the artist grew up, a stretch now destroyed by Los Angeles’ recent wildfires. Born and raised in LA, Hedison captured the ghostly forms in Untitled #10 (Nowhere) from the same position on the beach using a number of different cameras over a four-year period, overlaying the images on one another in the final print. An exploration of impermanence, space and memory, the series dates back to 2012 but takes on heightened poignancy in light of the tragic losses sustained in the fire. For the past 20 years, Hedison’s photographic work has traversed the territory between the familiar and the unknown, exploring unconventional development processes and her interest in the evolution of personal identity. Working primarily with large- and medium-format cameras, she presents her work in series, and her photographs are a direct encounter between the individual and the immensity of the landscape. She is also a filmmaker, and premiered her short film, Alok, at the Sundance Film Festival 2024. The documentary about Alok Vaid-Menon – the internationally acclaimed, non-binary poet, comedian, actor and public speaker –was named Best Documentary Short at the Sarasota Film Festival and Audience Award Winner (Documentary Short) at NewFest in New York City.

New textile works made for the fair by Bonolo Kavula include a large hanging tapestry made from tiny discs of fabric connected by thread. The South African artist hones in on a singular, culturally resonant material: traditional shweshwe cloth, inspired by a dress of her mother’s that is now a family heirloom. Stitched together at mathematically precise intervals, her near-translucent fabric grids are embedded with collective histories of culture and ancestry. The process is that of excessive repetition, each dot with its own landscape of minutiae, telling of the meditative action of labour and of the creation of new meaning through deconstruction and transformation. Born in Kimberley in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, Kavula was featured in signifying the impossible song, a group exhibition at Southern Guild Los Angeles in 2024.