Image courtesy of Zanele Muholi
Southern Guild presents a self-titled, autobiographical exhibition of the works of visual activist Zanele Muholi from 15 June to 17 August. The exhibition will feature several monumental bronze sculptures – the artist’s largest presentation of new sculpture to date – in the gallery. There will also be a presentation of new pieces in the Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series. This retrospective exhibition will trace the evolution of Muholi’s personal landscape in relation to the newer body of work.
With self-portraiture as its predominant mode, the exhibition, Zanele Muholi, presents a personal reckoning with themes including sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, gender-based violence and the resultant trauma, pain and loss, sexual rights and biomedical education.
The exhibition is a response, in part, to South Africa’s ongoing femicide, the stigmatisation of LGBTQI+ communities, and the proliferation of gender-based violence, particularly the ‘curative’ or ‘corrective’ rape of Black lesbians. Muholi’s own experience with uterine fibroids and reckoning with their Catholic background also heavily impacts the exhibition’s emotive symbology.
Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps /Southern Guild
A recurring element in the artist’s work, the gaze is investigated in a lightbox installation of pictures from an early series, Being (T)here, Amsterdam, displayed in the gallery’s public-facing windows. These photographs feature Muholi as a sex worker dressed in ‘umutsha’ (an isiZulu beaded waistbelt) and a black satin corset standing in a window during their Thami Mnyele Foundation Residency in 2009. The images capture spectators as they approach the red glow that frames a young, feminized Muholi. “Although their poses are powerful and alluring, there is a point at which they break away from the voyeur’s gaze and slump back into a seat in their cubicle – not out of leisure, but exhaustion from this performed exoticism.”
Muholi says. “This is no longer about me; it is about every female body that ever existed in my family. That never imagined that these dreams were possible.”
Curator Beathur Mgoza Baker says the exhibition “interrogates social, political, and biomedical practices and conditioning that has placed women, girls, and non-binary female bodies in conflict with their physical bodies. Central to their exploration is re-focussing women and audiences generally around the importance of their reproductive and sexual rights and autonomy.”
The exhibition portrays the agony and ecstasy of existing in a Black, queer female body, and the powerful nature of Muholi’s traverse through the world as both an artist and visual activist.
