20 YEARS OF FACES AND PHASES - Opening event and Exhibition | 8 September | 5pm | WiSER

MUHOLI ART INSTITUTE and WiSER PRESENT KHULULEKANI: 20 YEARS OF FACES AND PHASES

Johannesburg, South Africa - September 2026

The Muholi Art Institute, in collaboration with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER),

presents Khululekani, an exhibition marking 20 years of Zanele Muholi’s landmark and ongoing photographic series, Faces and Phases.

Initiated in 2006, Faces and Phases has become an expansive photographic archive of

Black LGBTQIA+ lives in South Africa and beyond. Through an ongoing practice of

portraiture, Muholi has photographed members of the community across two decades,

creating a body of work concerned with presence, memory, identity, and representation.

Khululekani invites audiences to encounter Faces and Phases as an ongoing record of

lives in motion, shaped by return, relation and the enduring act of being present.

Opening Event

8 September 2026

17:00–21:00

WiSER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus,
Wits University, Johannesburg

RSVP: info@muholiart.institute by 7 September 2026

Exhibition Dates

8 September – 8 October 2026

Media Enquiries

For interviews, images, and additional information, please contact: Muholi Art Institute info@muholiart.institute

Khululekani brings this twenty-year history into focus through a selection of portraits

that reflect the continued development of the series and the lives of those represented

within it. Central to the exhibition is the act of return. Several participants photographed

during the early years of Faces and Phases have been encountered again over time,

allowing the archive to register change alongside continuity.

Seen together, these portraits resist the idea of the photographic archive as a fixed

record of the past. Instead, they reveal an archive in motion, shaped by the lives,

histories and ongoing presence of the people within it.

The exhibition’s presentation in Johannesburg carries particular significance. Faces and

Phases returns to the city where the project began, twenty years after its first portraits

were made. Opening at the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, Khululekani

also considers ideas of growth, return and becoming, reflecting on what unfolds when

people are encountered again across time.

Over the past two decades, Faces and Phases has travelled internationally, bringing its

expansive archive into dialogue with audiences across diWerent contexts. Khululekani

oWers an opportunity to return to the series at a significant moment in its history while

recognising that the work remains ongoing.

The exhibition takes place as Muholi marks another significant milestone, following

their recognition with the Hasselblad Award for their pioneering contribution to

photography.