In Us is Heaven & Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 19 / Southern Guild

Group exhibition: In Us is Heaven

Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 19

Southern Guild, Los Angeles, CA

May 15 - September 5, 2025

In Us is Heaven serves as both sanctuary and site of confrontation. Negotiating heterogenous experiences and aesthetics, the exhibition’s works contend that Queer art is not marginal or other – it is everywhere, existing and persisting in the intersections of our cultural, political, spiritual and emotional landscapes. Running concurrently with Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases 19, which marks the geographic expansion of the visual activist’s seminal portraiture project, In Us is Heaven questions systems of regulation that enforce difference, shame and social failure, advocating for healing through the infinite resource of unbounded love.

Featured artists include Queezy Babaz, Jody Brand, Chloe Chiasson, Lea Colombo, Simon Haas, Alex Hedison, Rich Mnisi, Zanele Muholi, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Oluseye, Catherine Opie, Araba Opoku, Jody Paulsen, Athi-Patra Ruga, Brett Charles Seiler, Chiffon Thomas and Qualeasha Wood.

Faces and Phases 19 celebrates 19 years of Muholi’s seminal portrait project documenting the lives of Black lesbian, bisexual and Queer women, Trans and gender non-conforming people. Initially focused on South Africa, the new series of portraits expands the project’s geography into the US, UK, Brazil and Portugal. This now-historic body of work comprises a collection of close to 1,000 photographs, collectively forming a “living Queer archive”.

Moved into action by both love and loss, Muholi began the work of Faces and Phases in 2006. That year marked the 10th anniversary of the passing of the 1996 Civil Union Bill in South Africa, which legalised same-sex marriage and civil partnership. While this move for Queer institutional inclusion is notable for being ‘ahead of its time’, South Africa’s progressive branding is rarely indicative of its reality: A situation of extreme homophobic, Transphobic, and patriarchal violence forms the backdrop of a nation in which poor Black Queer people find themselves at particularly high risk of being the victims of horrific, often-fatal hate crimes.

In the face of the LGBTQIA+ community’s experience of grief, often exacerbated in the media by traumatising imagery or faceless statistics, Muholi sought to assert a counternarrative. In the collection of minimally staged, non-glamourised black-and-white portraits, Faces and Phases offered stories of Black lesbian life as beautiful, defiant, and crucially, as normal. As it has gained international recognition for its historical importance, the Faces and Phases archive has expanded not only in size, but in its scope and philosophy too. While its initial focus was on Black lesbians, it has since made way for more fluid understandings of gender and sexuality, and now includes the images and stories of Black Trans men and gender non-conforming people.

Accompanied by Muholi’s rich, interdisciplinary practice exploring self-portraiture and identity, race and the notion of becoming racialised, pleasure and sexuality, as well as other photographic engagements with Queer life, Faces and Phases – while ever-evolving – continues to provide solid ground to the artist’s work.