Southern Guild Debuts Bold African Vision at Art Basel Miami

Southern Guild enters Art Basel Miami Beach with a groundbreaking showcase spotlighting vital contemporary African voices

Southern Guild will debut at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 with a presentation that signals a watershed moment for African contemporary art on the world stage. From 3 to 7 December, at Booth B10, the gallery introduces a dynamic selection of works that foreground material innovation, cultural memory and decolonial imagination. Founded nearly two decades ago on the principles of collaboration, cultural stewardship and artistic exchange, Southern Guild now stands firmly on two continents — South Africa and the United States — advocating for an authentic, ongoing global dialogue. Its Miami debut follows an ambitious year of international expansion, including widely praised first-time presentations at Frieze Los Angeles, Frieze New York and Frieze London.

This meticulously curated booth brings together painting, sculpture, photography and assemblage, with many artists pioneering highly original technical processes. Their practices challenge legacies of representation, give form to suppressed histories and interrogate the complexities of race, gender, economic disparity and spiritual belief.

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Reimagining Portraiture and Visibility

Zanele Muholi continues to redefine the language of contemporary portraiture. Presenting new works from Somnyama Ngonyama — including a photographic lightbox and a large-scale aluminium print — Muholi extends their ongoing exploration of race, gender and selfhood. Through these bold material translations, they deepen a transnational archive of Queer existence and Black visibility. Chloe Chiasson and Ambrose Rhapsody Murray similarly navigate the politics of Queer identity with imaginative force. Chiasson’s dimensional reliefs mix painting, collage and assemblage to confront the heteronormative narratives of the American South, casting Queer desire as both refuge and reclamation. Murray turns to the cultural mythology of the automobile, using fragmentation and reconstruction to express longing, familial memory and the reinvention of identity.

Ambrose Rhapsody Murray Cross Roads 2024

Rewriting Histories and Reframing the Gaze

Roméo Mivekannin and Ayotunde Ojo examine the ethnographic gaze through contrasting forms of figuration. Mivekannin inserts his own likeness into canonical Western art, revealing the power structures embedded in these images. His practice — ahead of a major solo opening at Kunsthalle Giessen — dissolves the line between author and subject. Ojo offers a more introspective counterpoint: quiet, contemplative scenes rendered in oil, acrylic and charcoal where everyday domesticity becomes a site of psychological autonomy and refusal.

Speculative Futures, Spiritual Inheritance

South African artist Manyaku Mashilo presents a large-scale Afrofuturist diptych shaped by matrilineal teachings and Sepedi ritual. Her ochre-veiled figures move fluidly between celestial and earthly planes, suggesting futures rooted in ancestral knowledge. Marcus Leslie Singleton, exhibiting with the gallery for the first time, explores Queer identity, spirituality and the shifting realities of contemporary Black life. His narrative scenes embrace contradiction — joy and hardship, tenderness and complexity — revealing the multiplicity of lived experience.

Manyaku Mashilo In the radiance of stars 2025

Material Intelligence and Creative Excavation

Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s Brett’s Studio Wall becomes a vast archive of mark-making, pulled from more than 20 feet of studio wall. Through cold glue, ghosted script and embedded detritus, the surface becomes a living record of creative labour and artistic lineage. Johannesburg-based artist Usha Seejarim transforms wooden clothes pegs into sculptural assemblages that elevate domestic gesture into poetic structure. Her work acknowledges the unseen labour of care, motherhood and women’s work while opening space for tenderness and complexity. Moroccan artist Amine El Gotaibi introduces a new wall hanging in steel and wool, probing the tensions between nature and society through material weight and physicality. His work challenges perceptions of African identity while examining the continent’s internal and external narratives.

Monumental Forms and Ancestral Energies

Zizipho Poswa’s towering Isacholo — nearly ten feet high — reimagines a traditional Xhosa bracelet associated with healing. First featured in her Los Angeles solo exhibition, the sculpture bridges domestic ritual and monumental presence, underscoring the power of cultural symbolism. In resonance with Poswa’s formal language, Dominique Zinkpè’s bronze totems honour the Vodun spiritual practices of Yoruba heritage. Cast from hand-carved timber, each figure channels ancestral energy into contemporary sculptural form, continuing the artist’s continent-spanning legacy.

Zizipho Poswa Indyebo YakwaNtu Black Bounty 2025

A Moment of Consolidation and Creative Arrival

Southern Guild’s Art Basel Miami Beach debut is not simply a milestone — it is a culmination of years spent amplifying African voices and expanding the field of contemporary art through radical materiality, cultural depth and transnational collaboration. The booth affirms the gallery’s ongoing mandate: to elevate the global visibility and critical discourse surrounding the continent’s most resonant and visionary artists.