Paris Photo 2026

At the intersection of photography and material experimentation, Southern Guild's debut presentation at Paris Photo foregrounds four women artists who challenge the the conventions of the medium. Exhibiting in the fair's curated 'Voices' sector, the gallery will present works by Sandra Brewster, Lebohang Kganye, Zanele Muholi, and Silvia Rosi, whose distinct practices interrogate the photographic image as a site of representation, transformation, and invention.

Now in its 29th edition, Paris Photo is among the world's foremost international platforms for photography and image-based art, drawing an influential audience of specialist collectors, curators and institutions. The gallery's participation in 'Voices', curated by Zasha Colah and Francesco Zanot around the theme La Disparition (Disappearance), coincides with a period of profound transformation in the medium's history. As photography approaches its bicentenary, the sector considers the paradox of a medium conceived to preserve what might otherwise vanish, yet whose own forms and boundaries are increasingly subject to change.

Southern Guild's presentation explores disappearance as both loss and a generative condition. Moving between staged photography, archival reconstruction, textile, and experimental photographic processes, the four artists unsettle the photograph's presumed authority as a faithful record. Their work opens up the space between presence and absence, documentation and invention, revealing how photographic images can be materially and conceptually reconstituted.

Lebohang Kganye transforms the family archive into an imaginative terrain of remembrance and reconstruction. Drawing on inherited photographs, oral histories and personal narratives, the South African artist’s practice moves between photography, performance, sculpture, and textile, challenging the photograph's apparent fixity and proposing memory as an active process of storytelling. At Paris Photo, photographic works from Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story (2013) and Le Sale ka Kgotso (2025) will be exhibited alongside textile portraits from Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2022–2026), tracing the artist's evolving engagement with familial memory and the reconstruction of personal and collective histories.

In Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story, conceived following her mother's death, Kganye restages family photographs wearing her mother's clothes, superimposing her own image onto archival portraits to collapse the distance between generations. In Mosebetsi wa Dirithi, ancestral photographs are reconstituted as layered textile portraits, transforming the photographic image into a tactile record of familial memory. Her more recent Le Sale ka Kgotso extends these inquiries into the architecture of home, exploring domestic space as a repository of personal and collective histories, where memory, folklore and the unresolved legacies of apartheid intersect. A recipient of the 2024 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the 2025 International Center of Photography Infinity Award, Kganye has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and MoMA, with works held in major international collections including Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Silvia Rosi approaches the family archive through performative self-portraiture, examining the transmission of cultural identity and the experience of the African diaspora in Europe through her lens as an artist of Italian-Togolese descent. Drawing on the visual conventions of West African studio photography, Rosi constructs carefully choreographed, cinematic images in which costume, gesture, props and vivid colour become instruments of historical reconstruction. Through these staged compositions, she inhabits the lives of family members and ancestors, negotiating the gaps between inherited stories and lived experience.

Works from her Encounter (2019) and Disintegrata (2024) series explore the fluidity of identity and the instability of photographic representation. In Encounter, Rosi assumes the roles of her parents, reconstructing scenes through fragments of familial memory. In Disintegrata, the image itself undergoes fragmentation and dissolution, evoking the precariousness of cultural inheritance and the shifting relationship between the body and its representation. A recipient of the C/O Berlin Talent Award, Rosi presented her first solo exhibition in Germany, Protektorat, at C/O Berlin in 2025.

Sandra Brewster approaches the photographic image through processes of material disruption, exploring how memory, migration, and identity resist fixed representation. Her ongoing Blur series employs movement and photographic transfer to produce portraits in which figures become softened, fragmented and partially obscured. These fugitive images challenge photography's historical association with clarity and legibility, allowing the body to remain in motion and reflecting the layered experience of diasporic identity that informs her practice as a Canadian artist of Guyanese heritage.

Working across photographic transfer, drawing, painting and installation, Brewster foregrounds the physical vulnerability of the image itself. Through distortion, repetition, and material transformation, she proposes an alternative form of portraiture grounded in sensation and embodied experience, allowing ambiguity to become a means of recovering complexity rather than obscuring it. Her growing institutional recognition includes presentations at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as a monumental photographic installation of Make Trouble (2024) in the curated Platform section of The Armory Show in September 2026.

South African visual activist and 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate Zanele Muholi has spent more than two decades using photography as an instrument of visibility, self-representation and collective resistance. Across a practice encompassing portraiture, self-portraiture, moving image and sculpture, Muholi challenges the historical exclusion and misrepresentation of Black LGBTQIA+ communities, building an extraordinary visual archive grounded in dignity, agency and self-determination.

In their celebrated Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series, Muholi assumes a multitude of personae, transforming everyday objects into elaborate adornments and sculptural constructions. Through heightened contrast, controlled lighting and an extraordinary command of gesture, they continually reinvent their own image, shifting between vulnerability, defiance, satire and confrontation. These performative self-portraits engage the conventions of ethnographic, fashion and studio photography while subverting the colonial gaze and its histories of racialised representation. Muholi's receipt of the 2026 Hasselblad Award marks a landmark recognition of their contribution to photography and visual activism. Their work will also feature in the 2026 NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, opening on 13 December.

Together, the four artists propose a vision of photography that is materially inventive, performative and politically engaged. Their practices resist the notion of the photograph as neutral evidence, instead treating it as a constructed and contested space through which histories and identities can be recovered, revised and newly imagined. The all-women presentation affirms the vital contribution of artists whose work continues to reshape photography's visual language and challenge its established canon.

Southern Guild's Paris Photo debut follows its participation in Frieze London in October, extending the gallery's engagement with European collectors and institutions and marking a further expansion of its international fair programme. Building on the opening of its permanent New York gallery in Tribeca in April 2026, this latest milestone reflects a sustained period of international growth and the gallery's commitment to advancing ambitious, materially experimental practices across artistic disciplines.


PROGRAMMING
ZANELE MUHOLI BOOK SIGNING
Saturday 14 November 2026 | 13:30–15:00 | Booth B54, Voices Sector

Southern Guild will host a special book signing with Zanele Muholi celebrating Faces and Phases: 2006–2026, the third and latest volume dedicated to their landmark, lifelong portrait project. Published by MACK to mark the twentieth anniversary of Faces and Phases, the 464-page volume features more than 300 largely unpublished photographs made across South Africa and internationally. Edited by Renée Mussai, it includes more than 35 texts and testimonies, charting the project's geographical and representational expansion and its enduring commitment to visibility, kinship, self-representation and resistance.


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