Boss Women of the Art World: Zanele Muholi

Jun 17

“Instalment two of Made in Bed’s Boss Womxn series, Review’s contributing author Rebecca Howard discusses the work of photographic activist Zanele Muholi and the power of identity.”

This series is meant as praise to some of the women who laid the foundations for or who currently shaking things up in the art world.

Her enigmatic portraits are instantly recognisable, with eyes that, in no cliché terms, truly pierce souls. I will always remember the first time I encountered the work of Zanele Muholi as a turning point in my expectations of portraiture. I did my bachelor’s degree in rural Maine, the northeastern-most state in the US, populated by many moose and three sister liberal-arts colleges. In Maine, summer doesn’t start until the very end of May, and thus my visit to the Colby College Museum of Art took place on a spring day that could have easily been mistaken for winter anywhere else. Muholi’s show Somnyama Ngonyama, isiZulu for “Hail the Dark Lioness,” occupied the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries on the lower floor. Descending the steps, I was confronted with the cool, intense gazes of seventy versions of Zanele Muholi, in various sizes, covering the walls. A series completed entirely in black and white photography, Muholi skilfully manipulates the human perception of contrast to highlight distinct features of her narrative in an eloquent tone that sidesteps the need for creating garish shock value. The atmosphere of the gallery felt a good ten degrees cooler, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have attributed it to the weather.

But it was Muholi’s gaze, replicated seventy times throughout the space, that was so chilling. Created with the intention of rewriting history to incorporate “a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in South Africa and Beyond,”(Colby College Museum of Art) Muholi’s self-portrait series demands the acknowledgement of several population subsets with long histories of oppression. Black people, Black women, and Black queer folx, all of which are facets of Muholi’s identity, have been subjugated to some of the worst treatment in human history, much of which is still not recognised throughout the societies of formerly colonial nations. Through Somnyama Ngonyama, the weight of such a past is made tangible and conveyed to the viewer, so that they may, at least for a moment, understand the continued, contemporary force such a history maintains.

Muholi was born in 1972, in Umlazi, South Africa (Colby College Museum of Art). Negotiations to end the apartheid did not begin until 1990 and were not finalised until 1994; the first twenty-two years of Muholi’s life were spent in a society in which “identity was used as a weapon, a tool for subjugation and oppression” (New York Times). She came out to her family as gay in 1991, and although South Africa had some of the earliest legal protections and rights for queer individuals, social norms maintained a regime of violence and discrimination against anyone who countered their idea of “normal.” Photography became a way for her to collect the stories of people in her communities and provide them with the recognition that they had been so long denied. A blog Behind the Mask morphed into the series Faces and Phases (2006-2016), in which Muholi documented the experiences of Black lesbian and trans communities in South Africa (Lens Culture). Identity, used against her for the entirety of her childhood and young-adult years, became the focal point and foundation of her artistic career where she transformed it into a beacon for others who share her experience.

While the New York Times postulated that by establishing herself in the art world, Muholi “transcended her activist roots,” I would argue that the two are inextricably intertwined. Muholi’s work is as powerful as it is precisely because of her activism, and thus the activism with which she imbues her creations. Much ink has been wasted attempting to determine whether or not an artist can be separated from their artwork, and the reality is that they cannot be, nor should they be. The vibrancy of Muholi’s identity and personality, the depth of her experiences and her connections to cultural histories are the substantiating force behind the emotive responses her work engenders. Her work centres the discourse of identity on black bodies, hers and others, and demands the viewer engage with the consequences of identity and its reception in society. Muholi’s work chilled me because it so clearly translates her lived reality to the viewer, and made me meditate on and question my own place in such histories and narratives, my own privilege, my own complicity. Zanele Muholi’s art is her activism, and is a force with which to be reckoned.

Muholi has been featured at DOCUMENTA (13) and the 55th Venice Biennale. She was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015, and has won the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism in 2016, the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International, the 2013 Prince Clause Award, a Casa África award for “Best Female Photographer,” and a Fondation Blachère Award in 2009, among others. She is a cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women and the founder of a platform for queer visual media, Inkanyiso. She is represented in Johannesburg by Stevenson Gallery and in New York by Yancey Richardson. She is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts, Bremen, Germany. (Colby College Museum of Art)

Boss Women of the Art World: Zanele Muholi

“Instalment two of Made in Bed’s Boss Womxn series, Review’s contributing author Rebecca Howard discusses the work of photographic activist Zanele Muholi and the power of identity.”

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