Alick Phiri and William Matlala: I’ll Be Your Mirror

Installation View

Alick Phiri and William Matlala: I’ll Be Your Mirror

This is not an exhibition of heroes and heroines in the posture so often privileged within Southern African visual histories, where liberation iconography has dominated the frame and shaped the post-colonial and post-apartheid narrative. It resists the pull of monumentality and turns instead toward neighbours, colleagues, and loved ones – ordinary people whose lives unfold across the street, the workshop, the yard, and the long daily commute. It is about the quiet act of showing up, and the radical gesture of asking to be seen.

24. July 2025

Installation View

In bringing together the photographs of Alick Phiri and William Matlala, the curators of this timely exhibition have enacted a quiet act of photographic continental reunion. For the first time in a formal gallery setting, Zambia and South Africa are visually and conceptually linked through the photographic practices of two artists who navigated the constraints of postcolonial and apartheid-era regimes that policed the gaze and circumscribed Black expression.

In the mid to late twentieth century, photography in both countries was not only a technical challenge but a political one. Black photographers were systematically excluded from access to equipment, monitored in public spaces, and often subjected to intimidation or censorship for exercising their right to look. Yet Phiri and Matlala found ways to continue seeing. Their work is not extraordinary for its aesthetic composition or technical finesse, but for its persistence and the presence it affords, both at the time the photographs were produced and now. In contexts where state archives rarely recorded the everyday Black subject with dignity, these photographers created a counter- archive. Each image in this exhibition acts as a refusal of invisibility. Their archives, once private or scattered, are now public offerings of memory.

Excerpt of wall text by Dr. Siyabonga Njica.

Curated by Sana Ginwalla and Dr. Andrea Stultiens.

Installation view “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, Artists: Alick Phiri & William Matlala, Everyday Lusaka Gallery, Lusaka 2025. Alick Phiri artworks: Monoprints on Canvas and Monoprints on Paper, Digital Prints on Fabric. William Matlala artworks: Digital prints on paper, Digital Prints on Fabric. Photo Courtesy of Maingaila Muvundika.

Installation view “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, Artists: Alick Phiri & William Matlala, Everyday Lusaka Gallery, Lusaka 2025. Alick Phiri artworks: Monoprints on Canvas and Monoprints on Paper, Alick Phiri, Maingaila Muvundika and Sana Ginwalla: “Kanyama to Cambridge” Two-Colour Risograph Zine on Paper. Alick Phiri and Sana Ginwalla: “Lusaka Street” Photobook. Photo Courtesy of Maingaila Muvundika.