Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban, in 1972. She completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown and held her first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. She has worked as a community relations officer for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a black lesbian organisation based in Gauteng, and has as a photographer and reporter for Behind the Mask, an online magazine on lesbian and gay issues in Africa. Her work represents the black female body in a frank yet intimate way that challenges the history of the portrayal of black women’s bodies in documentary photography. Her solo exhibition Only half the picture, which showed at Michael Stevenson in March 2006, has travelled to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. She was the recipient of the 2005 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, and the first BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship in 2006. Recent group exhibitions include .za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica at Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008); Make Art/Stop AIDS at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2008); and Heterotopias: the first Thessaloniki Biennale (2007).
- La Rochelle on Disguise (15 May – 5 July 2008)
- Miss D’vine (2007)
- Faces and Phases (2007)
- Being (4 June – 7 July 2007)
- Portraits on Cape ‘07 (24 March 2007 – 2 May 2007)
- Portraits on South African Art Now (29 November 2006 – 6 January 2007)
- Only half the picture (29 March – 29 April 2006)
PUBLICATIONS
- Only half the picture (2006)
LATEST WORK
- Faces and Phases: Siyafana on Summer 2008/9: Projects (27 November 2008 – 10 January 2009)
February 5th, 2009 at 9:17 am
[...] “Zanele Muholi’s conceptual strategies are similar to Azubuike, however the physicality of the black female body is brought to the fore in her work. Indignant about being spoken for, about the portrayal of and attitude towards black lesbians, especially in the townships, over the past four years her work has set out to document the lives of ‘her’ people and ‘her’ community. The ensuing result are images as intimate as they are confrontational, provocative and transgressive. Muholi shows us the multidimensional aspects of black lesbian life and how they negotiate their private lives and the public space. In public the most virulent being the violence perpetrated again their person, one in which the rape of black lesbians by black men is seen as a curative process. This rape, this violence, this attempt to spill blood is metaphorically captured in the body of work “Period”. Using the symbolic power of menstrual blood, she highlights not only a process of violence and pain but also of renewal and rebirth. Muholi remains defiant, asserting that “stereotypes about the sexuality of black women need to be challenged by African women themselves. My photographs provide the radical aesthetic for women to speak.” [...]