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.