Zanele Muholi has opened the exhibition 'Sibaningi' at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, returning a major body of work to the institution that shaped the photographer's own formation — and, by extension, the visual record of queer life in South Africa.

The exhibition's title, drawn from the Nguni word for "we are many," signals the collective ambition that has defined Muholi's career. So does the declaration that anchors the show: "We will always be here."

Where is 'Sibaningi' showing?

The Market Photo Workshop, the Johannesburg school and gallery founded to train photographers under apartheid's constraints, is a fitting venue. Muholi studied there, and the institution has long served as an incubator for documentary photography concerned with black South African life.

The homecoming carries weight. Muholi has spent two decades building an archive of Black LGBTQIA+ lives in South Africa — a project the photographer has framed as corrective work, filling a visual record in which these communities were either absent or misrepresented.

The Market Photo Workshop's galleries will now hold the latest chapter of that ongoing project.

What recognition precedes the show?

'Sibaningi' arrives with Muholi established as one of the most decorated photographers working today. The artist's honours include the Hasselblad Award, photography's most prestigious international prize, awarded to Muholi as the first Black recipient — a landmark moment for the medium's institutional history.

That recognition has carried Muholi's work into major museums and biennials worldwide. What distinguishes 'Sibaningi' is the direction of travel: not outward to another European or North American kunsthalle, but back to Johannesburg, to the school where the practice began.

For audiences in South Africa, the exhibition closes a loop. Work made from and about South African queer communities returns to the city that produced it.

Why does the venue matter?

Muholi's practice has always been as much pedagogical and archival as aesthetic. The photographer has described the work as "visual activism" — images made so that future generations of queer South Africans might see themselves represented in the historical record.

The Market Photo Workshop shares that lineage. Founded in 1989 by David Goldblatt, it has trained successive generations of South African photographers who might otherwise have been excluded from formal photographic education.

Placing 'Sibaningi' within those walls frames the exhibition as inheritance as much as retrospective: the student's mature work returning to instruct and embolden the next cohort.

The title's plural pronoun — "we" — extends to that audience. Muholi's insistently repeated promise, "We will always be here," reads in this context as both artistic statement and institutional argument: that queer South African presence is not a subject to be documented from outside but a community that documents, exhibits and teaches itself.

What comes next?

'Sibaningi' runs at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, and its opening on 8 October 2026 marks the beginning of a run that positions the school's galleries as a serious destination for contemporary photography in the city — with Muholi, once again, at the centre of the frame.