On the occasion of the first solo exhibition of the South-African photographer Zanele Muholi in London, Autograph ABP presents a selection of works from her latest project entitled Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness. Known worldwide mainly for her series Faces and Phases documenting the black LGBTQI community in South Africa, the artist has recently decided to create a photographic archive centered on self-portrait. The visual activist Zanele Muholi has turned the camera on herself. The result is stunning.
Darkness: of the skin, of the walls; two epidermal layers, two membranes. This series of self-portraits unfolds in space and touches you to the core. Zanele Muholi is everywhere. She stares firmly at the lens, defiant or questioning. Her face multiplies. By increasing the contrast of the images post-production, the dark color of her skin is deepened even further. There is interplay between contrasts and lights, abstract backgrounds of the photographs and her torso in the foreground. Left as a dark surface, her body becomes a sculpture, adorned with accessories.
As she travels around the world, Zanele Muholi collects objects she finds along the way. Staged in each self-portrait, these materials are suggestive of some of the painful episodes in South-African history and of the country’s current problems. Set against a black female body, latex gloves revive the past burdens of domestic labor; electric cables evoke violence and torture; while pollution in South Africa is symbolized by soda cans and plastic bags. Together, these various elements lend themselves to a more global interpretation: they suggest a history of the body of the African woman and her relationship to the West.
The victim of a relentlessly imposed discourse, the figure of African woman had been above all marked and shaped by domination. Scrutinized, classified, and objectified, the black female body vacillated between eroticism and servitude. Ironically, Zanele Muholi both resuscitates and recovers the history of this body by superposing the different types of portrait. By confronting the viewer head-on, bedecked with accessories, the photographer offers a critical reading of the ethnographic gaze as well as of fashion photography. Photographed, her face becomes document and metaphor. By speaking for herself, Muholi also speaks for other women.
This exhibition is accompanied by a selection of self-portraits shown to the public for the first time: Bayephi, a series made in the Old Fort prison in Johannesburg, and ZaKi, a project exploring a possible hybridization between the black woman and Asia. Zanele Muholi uncompromisingly plays with codes, blending fiction and reality. The photographer speaks with melancholy about history and the past, which were insufficiently or poorly documented, even while she evokes the burden of persisting racism. Turning her own body into the new medium of a political project, with Somnyama Ngonyama, the activist “reappropriates her own blackness.” The “dark lioness” won’t leave you unscathed.
Julie Bonzon
Julie Bonzon is a Ph.D. student in art history at University College London (CUL).
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
July 14 to October 28, 2017
Autograph ABP
Rivington Place
EC2A 3BA
London
