Mapping and Archiving A Visual History of Black Lesbians in post-Apartheid South Africa
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Difficult Love
Description: A highly personal take on the challenges facing Black lesbians in South Africa today emerges through the life, work, friends and associates of 'visual activist' and internationally celebrated photographer, Zanele Muholi (who also presents). Video URL: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3128728089/
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2010 'I'm just doing my job.' photo credit: Robert Hamblin In October 2010 the Black Empowerment businessman Kenny Kunene spent R700 000 on his 40th birthday party at the ZAR Lounge nightclub in Johannesburg, which he owns. According to reports, his party featured models, who were painted grey, strutting around in lingerie; another model was draped across a table, and party-goers nibbled sushi served on her stomach. Kunene's guests included presidential spokesman Zizi Kodwa, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, and Malema's spokesman, Floyd Shivambu. A few days later, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi lashed out at "the BEE types who blow up to R700 000 in one night on parties", calling them members of the "predatory elite", which elicited a intense debate around the morality of the celebration. In response to this event, Muholi has photographed herself as one of the models. She has titled the work 'I am just doing my job', which was the answer one of the models offered when questioned after the event. |
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In Faces and Phases , I continue to document and explore black lesbian identities through portraiture, where the participants are photographed in their various domiciles. One of our collective painful experiences as a community is the loss of friends and acquaintances through disease or hate crimes. Some of these participated in my visual projects. What is left behind now is the individuals' portraits that works as a site of memory for us, as a trace of 'who and what existed' in a particular space at this particular moment when our black lesbian and South African histories intersect. More...
Artist statements...
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In the Being series (2007) I interrogate black lesbian relationships and safer sex. On the surface, the visuals capture couples in intimate positions and moments showing their love for each other. However, deeper within these I wish to highlight how HIV/AIDS prevention programming has failed women who have sex with other women.
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In my latest project "Massa" and Mina(h) ( 2008), I turn my own black body into a subject of art. I allow various photographers to capture my image as directed by me. I use performativity to deal with the still racialized issues of female domesticity-black women doing house work for white families. The project is based on the life and story of my mother. I draw on my own memories, and pay tribute to her domesticated role as a (domestic)worker for the same family for 42 years. The series is also meant to acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity, while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their place of work. There continues to be little recognition and little protection from the state for the hard labour these women perform to feed and clothe and house their families. More... |
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>via: http://www.zanelemuholi.com/photography.htm
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Zanele Muholi
Martin Machapa1 2006
Black Beulah 2006
Tri-Beulah 2006
Too Beulah
Dress Codes series 2006
Dress Codes series 2006
Dress Codes series 2006
Triple III, 2005
Ordeal, 2003
Closer to my heart I, 2005
Closer to my heart II, 2005
Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi
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Zanele Muholi
by Gabi Ngcobo (December, 2006)
In the past three years or so, Zanele Muholi's photographs have been generating excitement as much as they have been unsettling audiences in South Africa and elsewhere around the world. It seems important that we as South Africans, and indeed all Africans, should ask ourselves if we are ready for Muholi's voice and what she is beckoning us towards. Can we risk hearing, seeing and crossing to this seemingly unfamiliar territory? Muholi came into public awareness with her solo exhibition 'Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture' held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. The exhibition marked the end of her Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. After that, her work showing black lesbians in intimate moments became a subject of both private and public scrutiny from art historians, feminist and gender scholars. Muholi chose to stay closer to her experiences by capturing her world and 'people' as she would unsurprisingly declare. The closeness Muholi shares with the people she portrays plays itself out in a way in which they appear comfortable in the intimacy of their environments. The pictures are conceptually provocative, playful, and outright confrontational. As photography remains a mode of expression dominated by men, Muholi's images serve to claim a space for black female bodies from centuries of objectification. It is an exercise in ensuring that those rendered voiceless can begin to reclaim the (visual) culture that was historically denied to them. Muholi's work further evokes moments of women 'living under siege' as so straightforwardly articulated by feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola in a comment published in the Mail and Guardian (May 2004) entitled 'Bleeding on the streets of South Africa'. The current visibility of Muholi's work coincides with major political shifts and events, such as the much debated Same Sex Civil Union bill recently passed by South Africa, the first country in Africa and fifth in the world to allow such unions.
'This is a time for a visual state of emergence. The preservation and mapping of our herstories is the only way for us black lesbians to be visible. The textualisation of our cultures is not sufficient but historicising is not impassable. It is for this reason that I embark on what I call visual activism. My work is about observing and taking action. I take pictures of myself and other women to heal from my past. ?...It is personal issues that makes me do what I do, for I have been raped more than 50 times by just listening to what women who have confessed and confirmed their love for other women have been through.' 'I have seen people speaking and capturing images of lesbians on our behalf, as if we are incapable and mute. I have witnessed this at Gay Pride events, at academic conferences, in the so-called women's movement forums. Research opened my eyes even wider than the lens, and it made me feel autonomous. I refused to become subject matter for others and to be silenced. Many have exiled our female African bodies: by colonisers, by researchers, by men. Sarah Baartman became a spectacle for Europeans, and she died in a foreign land. She was never given a chance to speak for herself. ?...It is for this reason that I say No, not yet another black body'.
'When I see blood (menstrual blood, I'm assuming) crudely manipulated into the form of the female reproductive organ - that is disturbing. The photos of the misshapen, overweight woman - as Venus of Willendorfesque as she may be - it is unhealthy and again disturbing. Seeing the girl with the dildo - disturbing. Maybe I had a weak stomach 'cause I missed lunch, I don't know - I just don't find the photos 'beautiful'. Powerful, yes, beautiful no.' '... Zanele Muholi ushers in a new language to articulate Black lesbian sexuality creatively and politically at the same time. She visualizes it, represents it, captures it, defines it, traces its routes, and imagines its worlds anew. In her pictures, Black lesbian sexualities/identities emerge as a complex myriad with as many experiences and potentialities as exist for any human experience. The documentary and artistic dialects through which she carves such projects themselves reflect her content in their diversity and slipperiness. She is a photographer we cannot neatly classify, and she is one whose vision we would be foolish to ignore.'
Muholi has recently been awarded the first BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship. The fellowship promotes inspirational practice and teaching in visual arts through an artist-in-residence and teaching programme in the Division of Visual Arts in the Wits School of Arts. As part of the fellowship Muholi is in the final stages of editing her second documentary Being a Ma which looks at lesbian mothers and seeks to challenge confined and narrow definitions of motherhood as witnessed in the heteropatriarchal nuclear family concept that ignores sexual dynamism of many women living in South Africa. Recently Muholi's work has shifted from her usual focus and ventured into exploring lived realities of the black gay, transsexual and intersex people living around Johannesburg's inner city and townships. She currently features in the group exhibition 'Women: Photography and New Media: Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture' at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and 'South African Art Now' at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.
In 2005 Muholi was presented with the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts and subsequently mounted her solo exhibition 'Only half the picture' at Michael Stevenson Gallery. A catalogue was co-published by Michael Stevenson and STE in April 2006. 'Only half the picture' later travelled to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and to the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. In 2005, as an acknowledgement for her passionate activism within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersex (LGBTI) community, Muholi was awarded the first LGBTI Arts and Culture Award. In 2006 Muholi's work was featured in 'Second to None' curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Virginia MacKenny at Iziko South African National Gallery, and was part of a group show 'Olvida quien soy - Erase me from who I am' curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose with Khwezi Gule, Tracy Murinik and Gabi Ngcobo at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Mordeno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Her photography is included in Vitamin Ph published by Phaidon, London and Women by Women, 50 years of Women's photography in South Africa edited by Robin Comley, George Hallett and Neo Ntsoma.
'Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture', Muholi's first solo exhibition held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004 brought her to national attention and opened up invitations to feminist conferences, workshops and exhibitions. One such workshop, 'Gender and Visuality', held at the University of Western Cape, saw Muholi's pictures generating a number of heated comments from the public. Enraged by a Picture(2005), a documentary film by Muholi was a direct response to the feedback generated by the exhibition, it was first shown as part of the 'Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival'and subsequently travelled to 17 international film festivals in places including London, New York, Canada, Brazil, Germany and Korea. Through the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), an organisation that she co-founded, Muholi continues to train young women from Johannesburg townships in visual literacy and photographic skills.
Muholi is one of 63 artists whose work will be featured in 'TRANS CAPE' a multi venue exhibition of contemporary African art to be held in Cape Town in March next year. Her work will also be included in an exhibition of contemporary South African photography to be held at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) in Berlin in January 2007. Being a Ma will be shown as part of the 2007 'Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival', South Africa.
Muholi was Born in Umlazi, Durban, 1972. She lives and works in Johannesburg where she completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop, Newtown in 2004. Muholi co-founded and works for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (www.few.org.za). SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2006 Vienna Kunsthalle project space, Vienna SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND CONFERENCES 2006 'Women: Photography and New Media: Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture', Johannesburg Art Gallery AWARDS 2006 BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; The Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, USA; UNISA Art Collection, South Africa |
