As the 61st Venice Biennale opens, the city will witness a powerful independent presence from visual activist and 2026 Hasselblad Award Laureate, Sir Zanele Muholi. Titled Faces and Phases 20, the project, curated by Southern Guild, marks two decades of their groundbreaking photographic series of the same name, one of the most significant ongoing visual archives of Black LGBTQIA+ lives worldwide.
Opening on 5 May 2026 at the residence of Trisja Malisoff and Tony Podesta in the Castello district, the exhibition runs until 10 May. Conceived as an off-site activation, it brings a potent South African artistic presence to the Biennale at a moment when the official South African Pavilion has been withdrawn.
A Defiant Presence in Venice
Featuring over 200 black-and-white portraits selected from 2006 to the present, the exhibition foregrounds the cumulative scale of Faces and Phases as a living document. Installed across multiple rooms, the works create a palpable sense of collective presence — intimate yet expansive.
The unframed display evokes protest imagery, recalling the immediacy of posters and placards, and reinforcing Zanele’s practice of ‘visual activism’. A public-facing banner along the canal extends the project into the city itself.
Initiated in 2006, Faces and Phases addresses the historical erasure of Black Queer subjectivities, foregrounding dignity, self-representation, and collective memory. As Tate Modern director Catherine Wood has noted, Zanele’s portraits “insist on the presence of lives too often rendered invisible.” MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo describes the series as “a vital archive that interweaves aesthetic rigour with social activism, reframing Black Queer visibility across temporal and spatial boundaries.”
A Living Archive of Visibility and Memory
Running parallel to the exhibition from 6–10 May, Zanele will undertake a mobile photographic activation across Venice. Drawing on the legacy of 1950s–1960s West African studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, Zanele will operate a mobile studio with a pop-up backdrop, producing site-responsive portraits in public spaces. The focus will be on members of Venice’s Queer community, with particular attention to Black LGBTQIA+ individuals.
Extending the Work Into the City
At the core of this activation is an ethics of exchange. For each participant, Zanele will produce two Polaroid portraits: one retained for the archive, and one gifted to the sitter. This gesture resists extractive image-making, instead foregrounding reciprocity, co-authorship, and mutual recognition. The image becomes both document and offering — an ephemeral moment made tangible.
Together, the exhibition and activation position Venice as both site and subject. Faces and Phases stands as a radical reworking of documentary modes, shifting the genre from observation to collaboration, and from marginalisation to presence.
