1-54: New York
May 1 – 4, 2024
Muholi is a South African visual activist and photographer. For over a decade they have documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community, in 2006 Muholi embarked on an ongoing project, Faces and Phases, in which they depict black lesbian and transgender individuals. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is "to re-write 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 SA and beyond." These arresting portraits are part of Muholi’s contribution towards a more democratic and representative South African homosexual history. Through this positive imagery, Muholi hopes to offset the stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.
In a more recent ongoing series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi becomes both the participant and the image-maker, as they turn the camera on themself. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, Muholi’s self portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history. Through exaggerating the darkness of their skin tone, Muholi reclaims their blackness, and offsets the culturally dominant images of black women in the media today.
Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban and lives in Cape Town. They studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. Muholi has won numerous awards including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Africa'Sout! Courage and Creativity Award (2016); the Outstanding International Alumni Award from Ryerson University (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; and a Prince Claus Award (2013), among others. Muholi’s work has been exhibited at Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; and the 29th São Paulo Biennale.
Solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Autograph ABP, London: the Mead Art Museum, Amherst; Gallatin Galleries, New York; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo; Einsteinhaus, Ulm; Schwules Museum, Berlin; and Casa Africa, Las Palmas. Muholi's work is included in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and others.
Muholi was shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their publication Faces and Phases 2006-14 (Steidl/The Walther Collection). Other publications include Zanele Muholi: African Women Photographers #1 (Casa Africa and La Fábrica, 2011); Faces and Phases (Prestel, 2010); and Only half the picture (Stevenson, 2006). Muholi is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
August 30 – December 1, 2024
Focused primarily on sub-Saharan African countries, Marvellous Realism is transnational in outlook, the exhibition presents work by established and emerging artists using photography and film as a means to envisage contemporary African cultural identity as a state of ongoing possibility, in which myth, memory and movement weave together into a rich tapestry of expansively imaginative art works. The exhibition is founded on an awareness of how the rich and diverse contemporary art and cultural scenes in Africa remain largely unknown to the Chinese public, in spite of the importance of long-standing economic and political relationships. The featured artists in the exhibition invoke Africa as an innately cosmopolitan condition that is closer in kind to the philosopher Achille Mbembe’s description of the continent as ‘a body in motion born out of overlapping genealogies, at the intersections of multiple encounters with multiple elsewheres.’
Zanele Muholi opens survey at the Tate Modern
June 6, 2024 – January 26, 2025
Zanele Muholi presents their exhibition return to Tate Modern, following a highly successful and record-breaking European tour. With over 260 photographs, this exhibition presents the full breadth of Muholi’s career to date and is the first major UK survey of the artist’s work. New works will be presented from Muholi’s acclaimed series of dramatic self-portraits entitled Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail the Dark Lioness’). Turning the camera on themself, the artist adopts different poses and characters to address issues of race and representation. From scouring pads and latex gloves to rubber tires and cable ties, everyday materials are transformed into politically loaded props. The resulting images explore themes of labour, racism, Eurocentrism and sexual politics, often commenting on events in South Africa’s history and Muholi’s experiences as a Black queer person traveling abroad. Since 2020, Muholi has expanded their portraiture practice into sculpture. Exploring intimacy, four monumental sculptures in the exhibition reckon with the relationship between public and private spheres. These larger than life-size works include three bronze depictions of the artist and a bronze representation of female sexual anatomy.
Zanele Muholi Retrospecive Announced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
January 18 – August 11, 2024
A self-described visual activist, Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Umlazi, South Africa) uses the camera to explore issues of gender identity, representation, and race. Often photographing their own body or members of their LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, Muholi calls attention to the trauma and violence enacted on queer people while celebrating their beauty and resilience. Activism is central to Muholi’s artistic practice, from their early work contending with the dangers of being queer in South Africa to their more recent work embracing their own blackness and gender expression. This exhibition brings together photographs from 2002 to the present alongside the artist’s latest explorations in painting and sculpture. The first major exhibition of Muholi’s work on the West Coast, it provides the opportunity for Bay Area audiences to experience the full range of the artist’s expansive project.
Zanele Muholi Retrospective Announced at Maison Européenne de la Photographie
February 1- May 21, 2023
The MEP is proud to present the first retrospective in France devoted to Zanele Muholi, an internationally renowned South African photographer and activist, whose work documents the life of the black LGBTQIA+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual +) and the individuals who constitute it. This major event, which brings together more than 200 photographs, videos and installations created since the early 2000s as well as numerous archival documents, covers the full extent of Muholi's career to date, thus honoring the one of the most acclaimed artists today.
ICP Spotlights 2022 Honors Zanele Muholi
November 2, 2022
Founded in 2012, ICP Spotlights has spent ten years celebrating the immense talent of women imagemakers influencing the world of photography and visual culture. In its second decade and beyond, ICP Spotlights continues to make space for conversations regarding gender diversity in the field of photography. Though in the past ICP Spotlights has primarily supported women imagemakers, the ICP Spotlights Committee now looks to a more gender expansive community of imagemakers when determining the honoree of this prestigious award. ICP looks forward to celebrating women, non-binary, trans, intersex, and other gender expansive imagemakers at ICP Spotlights.
Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance
February 10 - May 8, 2022
Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance explores the life and work of internationally renowned photographer and visual activist Sir Zanele Muholi. For a decade, Muholi has documented South Africa’s Black LGBTQIA+ community. Through their visual archive of representation, the artist captures intimate expressions of beauty, vulnerability, love, loss, and belonging, while simultaneously confronting issues of identity politics, selfhood, and Black queer visibility.
Plural Possibilites & the Female Body, Winter 2021
This exhibition features works by over twenty artists from the Henry’s collection alongside select loans from Seattle collections. It is presented as part of the Henry’s participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nation-wide initiative that seeks to generate cultural awareness about feminist thought, experience, and action. The exhibition locates the feminist pursuits of bodily autonomy and self-determination in solidarity with racial and sexual difference and encourages us to consider the possibilities of the individual and collective female body when freed from bounded limitations.
Zanele Muholi
November 5, 2020 - June 6, 2021
Tate Modern presents the first major UK survey of visual activist Zanele Muholi. With over 260 photographs, this exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date. Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.
Time for Outrage! Art in Times of Social Anger
October 29, 2020 - January 10, 2021
The exhibition Time for Outrage! is based on the eponymous 2010 essay by French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel and brings together some forty international artists who visualise, reflect, and comment on various facets of anger and rage in our society. Their works deal with socio-political situations and inspire reflection.
And then you see yourself: Zanele Muholi
September 2, 2020 - January 18, 2021
And then you see yourself looks at the most recent Somnyama Ngonyama series through the lens of Muholi’s earlier works. Loosely chronological, a narrative about racial identity through self-portraiture unfolds over two decades, beginning in intimate, domestic, and sacred private space, and shifting to the public domain.
Implicit Tensions
July 24, 2019 - January 5, 2020
The second part of Implicit Tensions (July 24, 2019–January 5, 2020) addresses Mapplethorpe’s complex legacy in the field of contemporary art. A focused selection of his photographs is on view alongside works by artists in the Guggenheim’s collection, including Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.
May 11 - November 24, 2019
58th Venice Biennale
May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff
The 58th International Art Exhibition, titled May You Live In Interesting Times, will take place from 11 May to 24 November 2019 (Pre-opening on 8, 9, 10 May). The title is a phrase of English invention that has long been mistakenly cited as an ancient Chinese curse that invokes periods of uncertainty, crisis and turmoil; "interesting times", exactly as the ones we live in today.
February 15 - May 26, 2019
The Extended Moment: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada
The Extended Moment brings forth around seventy works that reveal the historical, technological, and aesthetic breadth of the collection, which is little known in this country. In the exhibition’s presentation at the Morgan, works of far-flung origins are placed side-by-side to highlight recurring trends and tensions in the history of the medium. Artists include Edward Burtynsky, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lynne Cohen, John Herschel, Richard Learoyd, Lisette Model, Zanele Muholi, Edward Steichen, and Josef Sudek.
Joyful and courageous, Zanele Muholi photographs Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals in South Africa, driven by an intense dedication to increasing the visibility of one of the country’s most vulnerable communities. The artist shares the personal motivations behind an ongoing self-portrait series that allows them to own their voice, identity, and history as a queer Zulu person. From a portrait session in the Johannesburg townships to a gallery opening in Cape Town, Muholi photographs LGBTI individuals, in the hopes of eradicating the stigma and violence that has pervaded queer communities in South Africa. Muholi and the participants in their work stake out their places in the world and demand that their voices be heard.
September 14 – December 8, 2018
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
In partnership with Autograph, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art is proud to present the United States premiere of Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness. In this internationally acclaimed exhibition featuring more than 70 photographs, visual activist Muholi, whose pronouns are they and them, uses their body as a canvas to confront the politics of race and representation in the visual archive. Muholi’s psychologically charged portraits are unapologetic in their directness as they explore different archetypes, personal and collective histories, contemporary politics, and global events. Somnyama Ngonyamaemploys the conventions of classical painting, fashion photography, and the familiar tropes of ethnographic imagery to critically rearticulate contemporary identity politics. By increasing the contrast in the dark complexion of their skin, Muholi interrogates complex representations of beauty, pride, and desire. Gazing defiantly at the camera, Muholi challenges the viewer’s perceptions while firmly asserting their cultural identity on their own terms.
June 30 - September 30, 2018
Give a Damn
The exhibition connects many media including painting, textile, photography, and drawing by 20th- and 21st-century artists diverse in race, sexual orientation, gender, age, and nationality. Many recent acquisitions are being shown at the museum for the first time, including work by Dawoud Bey, Jeffrey Gibson, Jane Irish, Zanele Muholi, Deborah Roberts, Wendy Red Star, archive material related to the Black Panther Party, and more. Recently conserved, Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman’s seminal Once a Noun, Now a Verb #1, 1997, is a large-scale, intensely intricate four-panel painting made in the height of the AIDS crisis that celebrates and examines what the artist has called the “bittersweet nature of life.”
(excerpt)
In this touring exhibition by Autograph ABP, South African visual activist Zanele Muholi presents their ongoing self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (meaning Hail, the Dark Lioness in isiZulu, one of the eleven official languages in South Africa). The exhibition comprises more than 75 photographs with Muholi using their body as a canvas to confront the politics of race and representation in the visual archive.
Congratulations to Zanele Muholi on receiving the Knighthood of the Order of Arts and Letters bestowed by the French Government. Muholi states, "This honour is not for me, it's for every other black LGBTQI, or any other person, who understands what it's like at this time to be us. It means more than a lot, and hopefully it paves the way for many who will follow us, and honours those who came way before us, and who never had an opportunity to be recognised."
August 12 - December 30 2017
Other Side: Art, Object, Self
What is the “other side”? Is it the same for everyone? This exhibition, featuring contemporary artworks from the Tang’s collection, offers many “other sides.” The artists in Other Side: Art, Object, Self explore the interconnections and elusive boundaries between concepts like life and death, seen and unseen, loss and hope, artifice and truth. They use objects, materials, and bodies in provocative ways to encourage viewers to assess preconceived notions and to prompt critical examinations of the self—of national, cultural, and personal identities.
July 8 - October 15, 2017
Zanele Muholi
Making its Dutch premiere is Muholi’s latest series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Black Lioness, 2015 to the present). A series of self-portraits, this body of work marks a radical new step in her oeuvre. Often experimenting with dramatic poses and lighting, Zanele turns the camera on herself, capturing the multiple roles that she assumes as a black lesbian woman. Through the use of high-contrast black and white tonal values, Muholi exaggerates her skin tone to emphasize her ‘blackness’. Curator Hripsimé Visser: “Her self-portraits are profoundly confrontational yet witty, and searingly emotional, too. Through an inventive manipulation of props and lighting, Muholi creates historical, cultural and personally inspired versions of ‘blackness’. With this, she defies stereotypical images of the black woman and speaks to current debates about stigmatisation and stereotyping.”
The Stedelijk Museum also presents a comprehensive selection of works from two other important series: Faces and Phases, and Brave Beauties. Also in the show is a projection of the documentary We Live in Fear (2013), and one of the exhibition galleries has been transformed into a documentary space for Inkanyiso, (Zulu for ‘the one who brings light’), the multi-media internet platform that Zanele Muholi founded in 2009 to create a visual history of LGBTQI communities.
Making its Dutch premiere is Muholi’s latest series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Black Lioness, 2015 to the present). A series of self-portraits, this body of work marks a radical new step in her oeuvre. Often experimenting with dramatic poses and lighting, Zanele turns the camera on herself, capturing the multiple roles that she assumes as a black lesbian woman. Through the use of high-contrast black and white tonal values, Muholi exaggerates her skin tone to emphasize her ‘blackness’. Curator Hripsimé Visser: “Her self-portraits are profoundly confrontational yet witty, and searingly emotional, too. Through an inventive manipulation of props and lighting, Muholi creates historical, cultural and personally inspired versions of ‘blackness’. With this, she defies stereotypical images of the black woman and speaks to current debates about stigmatisation and stereotyping.”
The Stedelijk Museum also presents a comprehensive selection of works from two other important series: Faces and Phases, and Brave Beauties. Also in the show is a projection of the documentary We Live in Fear (2013), and one of the exhibition galleries has been transformed into a documentary space for Inkanyiso, (Zulu for ‘the one who brings light’), the multi-media internet platform that Zanele Muholi founded in 2009 to create a visual history of LGBTQI communities.
Making its Dutch premiere is Muholi’s latest series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Black Lioness, 2015 to the present). A series of self-portraits, this body of work marks a radical new step in her oeuvre. Often experimenting with dramatic poses and lighting, Zanele turns the camera on herself, capturing the multiple roles that she assumes as a black lesbian woman. Through the use of high-contrast black and white tonal values, Muholi exaggerates her skin tone to emphasize her ‘blackness’. Curator Hripsimé Visser: “Her self-portraits are profoundly confrontational yet witty, and searingly emotional, too. Through an inventive manipulation of props and lighting, Muholi creates historical, cultural and personally inspired versions of ‘blackness’. With this, she defies stereotypical images of the black woman and speaks to current debates about stigmatisation and stereotyping.”
The Stedelijk Museum also presents a comprehensive selection of works from two other important series: Faces and Phases, and Brave Beauties. Also in the show is a projection of the documentary We Live in Fear (2013), and one of the exhibition galleries has been transformed into a documentary space for Inkanyiso, (Zulu for ‘the one who brings light’), the multi-media internet platform that Zanele Muholi founded in 2009 to create a visual history of LGBTQI communities.
Making its Dutch premiere is Muholi’s latest series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Black Lioness, 2015 to the present). A series of self-portraits, this body of work marks a radical new step in her oeuvre. Often experimenting with dramatic poses and lighting, Zanele turns the camera on herself, capturing the multiple roles that she assumes as a black lesbian woman. Through the use of high-contrast black and white tonal values, Muholi exaggerates her skin tone to emphasize her ‘blackness’. Curator Hripsimé Visser: “Her self-portraits are profoundly confrontational yet witty, and searingly emotional, too. Through an inventive manipulation of props and lighting, Muholi creates historical, cultural and personally inspired versions of ‘blackness’. With this, she defies stereotypical images of the black woman and speaks to current debates about stigmatisation and stereotyping.”
The Stedelijk Museum also presents a comprehensive selection of works from two other important series: Faces and Phases, and Brave Beauties. Also in the show is a projection of the documentary We Live in Fear (2013), and one of the exhibition galleries has been transformed into a documentary space for Inkanyiso, (Zulu for ‘the one who brings light’), the multi-media internet platform that Zanele Muholi founded in 2009 to create a visual history of LGBTQI communities.
Making its Dutch premiere is Muholi’s latest series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Black Lioness, 2015 to the present). A series of self-portraits, this body of work marks a radical new step in her oeuvre. Often experimenting with dramatic poses and lighting, Zanele turns the camera on herself, capturing the multiple roles that she assumes as a black lesbian woman. Through the use of high-contrast black and white tonal values, Muholi exaggerates her skin tone to emphasize her ‘blackness’. Curator Hripsimé Visser: “Her self-portraits are profoundly confrontational yet witty, and searingly emotional, too. Through an inventive manipulation of props and lighting, Muholi creates historical, cultural and personally inspired versions of ‘blackness’. With this, she defies stereotypical images of the black woman and speaks to current debates about stigmatisation and stereotyping.”
The Stedelijk Museum also presents a comprehensive selection of works from two other important series: Faces and Phases, and Brave Beauties. Also in the show is a projection of the documentary We Live in Fear (2013), and one of the exhibition galleries has been transformed into a documentary space for Inkanyiso, (Zulu for ‘the one who brings light’), the multi-media internet platform that Zanele Muholi founded in 2009 to create a visual history of LGBTQI communities.
The FotoFocus Biennial is a regional, month-long celebration of photography and lens-based art held throughout Cincinnati and the surrounding region. Featuring over 60 participating museums, galleries, academic institutions, and community organizations, the 2016 Biennial will include original FotoFocus curated exhibitions and four days of events and programming, including screenings, lectures, and performances.
October 8, 3:30pm - 7:00pm
3:30pm Exhibition Reception for FotoFocus Curated Exhibitions Zanele Muholi: Personae, Jackie Nickerson: August, and Robin Rhode: Three Films
5:30pm Evening Program with Zanele Muholi, Artist, Johannesburg, South Africa, Introduction by Sophie Hackett, Curator, Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario
| SYSTEMATICALLY OPEN?—New Forms for Contemporary Image Production Somnyama Ngonyama Curated by Zanele Muholi (b. 1972; lives and works in Johannesburg) Drawn from a Zulu phrase meaning "Hail, the Dark Lioness," Somnyama Ngonyama uses stylized self-portraiture as a means to commemorate, question, and celebrate the ways the black body has been represented in photography. Augmented with shells, textiles, and other objects, the artist's diverse coiffures explore hair as symbolic primary material and a central facet of African identity and stylistic expression. An acknowledgement of South Africa's political history and a series of activist networks operating today in the country and elsewhere, Muholi's project comments on aesthetic and cultural issues that affect black people, and specifically black women, in Africa and its diaspora. |
Zinathi: photographs by Zanele Muholi
A Gallatin Student Affairs/Life Black History Month Program: Dismantling the Master's House: The Spectrum of Black Activism. Co-sponsored with The Gallatin Galleries
Reception with the artist Friday, February 26th 5-7 p.m.
Widely considered the leading honor for excellence in the field, the Infinity Awards is ICP's largest annual fundraiser, supporting all of its programs, including exhibitions, education, collections, and community outreach.
Second-Hand Reading: William Kentridge and Zanele Muholi
Kentridge and Muholi offer perspectives on South Africa from two generations.
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Somnyama Ngonyama, the debut exhibition of self-portraits by South African artist Zanele Muholi and her second solo exhibition at the gallery. Somnyama Ngonyama, meaning "Hail, the Dark Lioness", represents a newly personal approach taken by Muholi as a visual activist confronting the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive.
EXHIBITIONS|GROUP SHOWS
"Contact" Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice
September 11, 2015 - January 10, 2016
"Vukani/Rise" Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
September 18 - November 29
"Making Africa, A Continent of Contemporary Design" Guggenheim, Bilbao
October 23, 2015 - February 21, 2016
May 1 - November 1, 2015.
Isibonelo/Evidence, is the most comprehensive museum exhibition to date in the United States devoted to the critically acclaimed South African artist. The show comprises eighty-seven pieces created between 2007 and 2014, including the renowned Faces and Phases series, an ongoing portrait project that documents the breadth of identities contained within the LGBTI communities of South Africa.
CURRENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, New York, 5 June to 9 September
Read more.
The Order of Things at The Walther Collection, Ulm, Germany through 9 October, 2015
Read more.
Wellcome Collection's The Institute of Sexology, London through September 20, 2015 Read more.
A rotating selection of Muholi's photographs and over 400 works by 200 other artists, architects, and designers in the group show Une Histoire, Art, Architecture et Design Des Annees 80 a Aujoudhui concentrating on art, architecture, and design from the 1980s to today runs through March 2016. Read more.
Work by Zanele Muholi is included in the group exhibition, Contemporary Art / South Africa, at the Yale University Art Gallery, on view through September 14, 2014. The exhibition features work produced in South Africa or by South Africans over the past fifty years, and includes Muholi, William Kentridge, Robin Rhode, and Santu Mofokeng, among others.
Work by Zanele Muholi will feature in the group exhibition Apartheid & After at the Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, opening on March 15 and on view through June 8, 2014. Other exhibiting artists include David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Daniel Naude, Guy Tillim, Mikhael Subotzky, and Jo Ractliffe, among others.
A solo exhibition of Zanele Muholi's work is on display at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, through April 27, 2014, featuring photographs from three separate bodies of work: Faces and Phases (2006-ongoing), Beulahs (2006-2010), and Being (2007).
Gallery artist Zanele Muholi presents an installation of 48 portraits from her acclaimed Faces & Phases series at the 2013 Carnegie International survey of contemporary art, through March 16, 2014 at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh.
Zanele Muholi will be featured in the South African Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, curated by Brenton Maart, with the theme Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive. She is included in All You Need is Love at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (April 25 - Sept 1), and has been selected for the 2013 Carnegie International survey of contemporary art, opening October 4.
Zanele Muholi is included in The Progress of Love, a collaboration between The Menil Collection, Houston, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, MO. On view at The Menil Collection through March 17, 2013.
