Pieter Hugo brings more than 100 portraits to Stevenson Gallery for his exhibition Polyphonic. The portraits span the past 20 years and have been taken across the globe, from Graaff-Reinet to Beijing. With Polyphonic Hugo continues his enquiry into forensics, surveillance and taxonomies which made up Being Present, his 2021 survey exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.

There is a strong humanism at the core of Hugo's work and the exhibition offers ways of thinking through the tensions between difference and similarity, individuation and collectivity.

Hugo questions the efficacy and exhaustiveness of classifying individuals. By compiling these portraits into an exhibition he likens it to the writings of Umberto Eco in The Infinity of Lists, "The list becomes a way of reshuffling the world … they accumulate properties in order to bring out new relationships between distant things, and in any case to cast doubt on those accepted by common sense."

Exhibition opens Sat, Dec 3, 10:00-13:00. The gallery will close for the festive season from Fri, Dec 16 to Mon, Jan 9.