Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, a township outside Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1972, the youngest of eight children. Their mother was a domestic worker who cleaned the homes of white families during apartheid. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. They describe themselves as a visual activist rather than an artist. They completed an advanced photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 2003 — the school founded by photographer David Goldblatt to provide arts education during apartheid — and received an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University in Toronto in 2009. Their thesis mapped the visual history of Black lesbian identity and politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Their work begins from an absence. The visual archive of Black queer life in South Africa did not exist. Without images, the community could be treated as if it were not there, as if queerness were un-African, a colonial import. Muholi's stated mission is to rewrite a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of their resistance and existence. Their Faces and Phases series, begun in 2006 and comprising over 300 portraits, photographs Black lesbian and transgender individuals across South Africa using a consistent formal method: head and shoulders, black and white, no backdrop, no accessories. Each person is individualized by the formal attention; the series as a whole insists on the community's scale and presence. It is dedicated to Busisiwe Sigasa, a friend and activist who died at twenty-five from AIDS-related complications contracted after she was a victim of corrective rape. Somnyama Ngonyama — Hail the Dark Lioness — turns the camera on Muholi's own body. In more than eighty self-portraits made across the world, they use found materials as props: scouring pads and latex gloves for domestic servitude, rubber tires and cable ties for social brutality, cowrie shells to confront Western fascinations with exoticized African cultures. The photographs are black and white, high contrast, the skin's depth emphasized. The face is always central. The gaze is always direct. Their work is held by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, MoMA, and the South African National Gallery. A major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2020 broke attendance records. They co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women in 2002 and the queer media platform Inkanyiso in 2009.

Wikipedia →