After a six-year absence, Southern Guild is back at Frieze London with powerful and unapologetically ambitious works, provokingly impossible to look away from.
The Cape Town based Southern Guild has built its reputation on amplifying progressive contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora, and Frieze London year’s lineup proves the highly reputable gallery is doubling down on that commitment. Its booth – running until 19th October at The Regent’s Park – brings together Zanele Muholi, Zizipho Poswa, Bonolo Kavula, Manyaku Mashilo, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, and Roméo Mivekannin, while also marking the gallery’s first fair presentation of New York-based artist Chloe Chiasson and Spanish-Guinean painter Chidy Wayne.
The timing is also significant. Following presentations at Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles earlier this year, the London edition signals Southern Guild’s expanding fair programme and their sustained commitment to positioning culturally resonant voices within contemporary global discourse.
For those who caught last year’s Frieze Sculpture, the fair’s public art initiative in the park’s historic English Gardens, Poswa and Muholi will be familiar names. Both had sculptures selected by curator Fatoş Üstek, and now London audiences get to dive deeper into their practices.
A Focus on Matrilineal Memory
There’s a clear curatorial thread running through Southern Guild’s presentation: strong women artists whose diverse practices explore the intersections of gender identity, sexuality, race and class – featuring several monumental and large-scale pieces that foreground non-traditional approaches to materiality, with many of the artists pushing into new and bold techniques.
Who is Who:
Zizipho Poswa: Matriarchal Stewardship
Zizipho Poswa unveils a new ceramic sculpture in her Umthwalo series, where a cluster of orb-like 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.
Her intuitive vocabulary of shape and colour celebrates ancestral practices of hair-braiding, women’s labour and spiritual ceremony. With a forthcoming solo at Southern Guild Cape Town in February 2026, Poswa’s momentum continues to build. Recent acquisitions by institutions including Die Neue Sammlung in München, Germany, and inclusion in group exhibitions at The Soloviev Foundation Gallery in New York and Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town signal growing institutional recognition.
Manyaku Mashilo: Cosmic Ancestry
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 U.S. debut earlier this year with The Laying of Hands at Southern Guild Los Angeles, and 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.
Bonolo Kavula: Threading Memory
A two-and-a-half-metre, multi-panel textile work sees Banolo Kavula venture further into three dimensionality. Her practice 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, Kavula’s use of the material carries the weight of matrilineal inheritance. The 2023 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize winner 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.
Zanele Muholi: Visibility as Activism
If you saw Zanele Muholi’s major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern in 2024, you know the power of their work. But Frieze London marks the first time their work will be shown in the city since that exhibition, and the visual activist isn’t resting on their laurels. Known primarily for their prize-winning photography, Muholi broadens their formal exploration here with two colossal photographic murals on aluminium, a transgressive sculpture, and a newly released lightbox series.
The standout? An expansive hand-beaded wall hanging that depicts aerial landscape photographs captured through airplane windows during Muholi’s extensive travels. The panel is abstracted into prismatic fragments and rendered in intricately strung swathes of glass beads. Travel functions as both subject and methodology here,an essential ritual in the building of Muholi’s nomadic, transnational archive of selfhood and Queer being.
Then there’s The Protector: a seven-foot-tall sculpture that realizes 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. The work also features a pair of self-portraits from their seminal Somnyama Ngonyama series printed onto aluminium,Muholi’s compelling manifesto of visibility for the Black, non-binary body, writ large.
Chloe Chiasson: Queer Americana
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. Her 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, 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.
Roméo Mivekannin: Rewriting the Canon
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.
Chidy Wayne: The Fighter’s Journey
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.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: Mark-making
Completing the exhibition is work by Iranian-born, Cape Town based Kamyar Bineshtarigh, whose “interest in text, particularly Arabic script and calligraphy, has become an explorative means to study the nature of mark-making and the cultural complexities that often arise through translation.”
