AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Ron Mandos will present Hlanganani (“Bring Together”), a new exhibition by South African visual activist Prof. Sir Zanele Muholi, opening Saturday 12 September 2026. Presented together with the Muholi Art Institute, the exhibition marks twenty years since Muholi began Faces and Phases and brings together new self-portraits, recent work, and a new body of Faces and Phases portraits made with Amsterdam’s Black queer community. On view through Saturday, 1 November 2026.
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Umlazi, Durban) is an internationally recognised visual activist and photographer, known for a body of work that documents and celebrates the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities. Since 2006, Muholi’s practice has grown into one of the most significant visual archives of Black LGBTQIA+ life anywhere in the world.
“It is important to mark, map and preserve our mo(ve)ments through visual histories for reference and posterity, so that future generations will note that we were here.” — Zanele Muholi
At its centre, this exhibition is an act of activism. For twenty years, Muholi has documented Pride marches and queer communities around the world, insisting on the visibility of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex lives. That work continues beyond the gallery through the Muholi Art Institute (MAI), which Muholi founded in Cape Town in 2021 to advance art education, community outreach and youth development. MAI’s educational programme underpins the public activities accompanying this exhibition: for Muholi, education on Pride and queer visibility is not a single day or season, but a 365-day commitment.
The exhibition opens with a selection of self-portraits from Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail the Dark Lioness”, 2012–ongoing). Made largely while Muholi is travelling for exhibitions and residencies, the portraits are constructed from whatever is at hand, hotel bedding, curtains, everyday objects, with hairstyles, costumes and sets entirely self-realised and photographed using only natural light. By deepening the contrast of each image, Muholi confronts the exoticising gaze while insisting on Black self-representation.
Alongside this, the exhibition presents a dedicated installation of Faces and Phases, initiated in 2006, the same year South Africa became the first country on the African continent to legalise same-sex marriage. What began as a response to the erasure of Black lesbian, transgender and gender non-conforming people from public and historical records has grown, over two decades, into an archive of hundreds of portraits made across five continents.
Muholi’s relationship to Amsterdam and the Netherlands spans nearly two decades. In 2009, Muholi undertook a three-month residency with the Thami Mnyele Foundation, living and working from the foundation’s studio in Amsterdam Oud-West between July and September of that year, the same year they were also an artist in residence at MIT. The Amsterdam residency proved formative, prompting Muholi’s early experiments with performative self-portraiture in the series Being (T)here, staged as a public intervention in the city’s Red Light District, alongside new portraits for Faces and Phases made with women loving women in the Netherlands. That year, Muholi’s work was also included in Rebelle: Art & Feminism 1969–2009 at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, where they returned in 2011 for the group exhibition Dineo Bopape, Marlene Dumas, Zanele Muholi. In 2017, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presented Muholi’s first solo museum exhibition in the Netherlands, bringing together Somnyama Ngonyama, Faces and Phases, alongside a dedicated space for Inkanyiso, the platform for queer visual media Muholi founded in 2009. Muholi’s work has also been shown at Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam.
