The Armory Show 2025

The presented works navigate the intersections of identity, history and form, offering considered reflections on personhood and place-making. Representing diverse perspectives, the presentation amplifies the gallery’s dedication to African artists whose practices challenge conventional boundaries and contribute meaningfully to global contemporary discourse.

Over the past year, Southern Guild has further developed relationships with artists across the African continent and diaspora, underscored by the milestone 2024 opening of its Los Angeles space and the substantial expansion of its presence on the international fair circuit. The focused presentation at The Armory Show embodies the gallery’s evolving curatorial vision and its commitment to fostering transcontinental dialogues.

Highlights of Southern Guild’s booth at The Armory Show 2025:

Two lightbox works by visual activist Zanele Muholi give illuminated form to photographs from their acclaimed Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series. Impromptu and nomadic, the self-portraits are taken in various interior settings – often hotel rooms – presenting the artist as a shifting vessel for different characters and archetypes. This ever-expanding oeuvre of black-and-white images responds 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 was the focus of three institutional shows in 2025 at Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal; Instituto Moreira Salles Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil; and SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, US. Currently, their solo exhibition Faces and Phases 19, at Southern Guild Los Angeles (until 6 September), reflects their deep commitment to building Queer kinship across geographical borders with over 100 new portraits of LGBQTIA+ people taken in Los Angeles, Salvador, São Paolo, Porto and London.

A ceramic and bronze sculpture from Zizipho Poswa’s ongoing Magodi series honours the traditions of African hair styling, passed down through generations of women across the continent and diaspora. Poswa uses titling to pay tribute to the hairstyle’s origins, tracing the geographical,
cultural and personal journey of its evolution. This particular work is titled after the artist herself in reference to the Bantu knot hairstyle she often wears. One of the continent’s leading ceramic artists, her work was recently acquired by The Princeton University Art Museum and is currently
featured in Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Between Distance and Desires at The Soloviev Foundation in Manhattan. A solo exhibition by Poswa will open at Southern Guild Cape Town in February 2026.

New paintings by Manyaku Mashilo trace the matrilineal transfer of knowledge in her own family and Sepedi culture. Mashilo’s larger-than-life female figures are cloaked in red paint, 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. 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.

New smoke-fired ceramic sculptures by Madoda Fani draw from indigenous knowledge systems and his own introspective practice. Schooled in traditional Nguni ceramic techniques, Fani leaves
his organic forms unglazed, burnishing their surfaces to a smooth polish and firing them in a drum to achieve a lustrous effect. The works at The Armory Show form part of a new body of work, Inzonzobila (The Deep), which will be presented in a solo exhibition at Southern Guild in
November 2025. A 2022 finalist of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Fani exhibited specially commissioned pieces in LOEWE TEAPOTS at Palazzo Citterio during the 2025 Salone del Mobile in Milan. His work was recently acquired by The Princeton University Art Museum and is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mint Museum, as well as notable private collections.

A pair of large-scale oil paintings by Mmangaliso Nzuza, including an immersive two-panel work, assert a bold angularity in their approach to figuration, while expanding on the artist’s richly allegorical vernacular. Nzuza’s figures exude a particular sculptural dignity, with the body being utilised as an instrument to explore possibilities of composition and angular form. Working textural fragments of impasto paint into patchwork planes of movement and light, he has developed a distinct language that is attracting a growing collector audience. His work was recently acquired by the Taguchi Art Collection in Japan.

A large-scale figurative painting by Terence Maluleke celebrates Black dandyism with a depiction of the American rapper Pusha T wearing a crystal-bedecked Louis Vuitton suit at this year’s Met Gala. Maluleke is a visual storyteller whose stylised portraits, urban scenes and vivid still-life compositions explore the complex intricacies of the modern urban Black experience. He has developed a unique artistic language combining emerging art technologies, traditional tools and methods, and graphic comic formats. His most recent body of work, A Love Letter
to Joburg, First Draft, was presented by Southern Guild at RMB Latitudes 2025 in Johannesburg, following his 2024 debut solo in the United States, Like a Fish in the Water, at Southern Guild Los Angeles.

Two 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. Mivekannin incorporates archival material to expose the Eurocentric gaze, basing his work on the “memory of history” – literally and figuratively. In both his formal and conceptual approach, he seeks both to ward off the relationships of domination that persist in our collective representations and to reappropriate stolen memories. 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. In these works, the surface becomes a “true, present body”: a black mirror that does not reflect signs and images, but breathes them in and traps them within its fibres. 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.

An abstract mixed-media painting from a new series by Kamyar Bineshtarigh foregrounds his interest in mark-making and the memorialisation of space. Using a unique process of wall extractions from sites of interest, Bineshtarigh is currently exploring found marks from the
walls of artists’ studios – the focus of his forthcoming solo exhibition, Group Show, at Southern Guild Cape Town in August. Featured in Phaidon’s volume Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art, the works from his 2023 solo exhibition 9 Hopkins mapped the now demolished industrial building that housed his studio, accretions of memory and grief at the city’s fraught legacy of class and racial division. His work was recently acquired by the Jorge M. Pérez Collection in Miami.

A sculptural wall hanging by Amine El Gotaibi combines steel and wool with a visceral physicality that has come to define the Moroccan artist’s practice. El Gotaibi's work is deeply rooted in exploring the dichotomies between nature and society, with a particular focus on his native North Africa and the broader continent. His work investigates both external and internal perspectives on African identity, consistently pushing boundaries in scale and ambition. His ongoing project, VISIT to Okavango, exemplifies his commitment to continental research and exploration, envisioning a future where Africa's diversity and wealth are fully recognised. El Gotaibi was selected for the 2024 Doha Design Biennial and nominated for the 2025 Norval Prize.