Installation view of Faces and Phases, Zanele Muholi at the Tate Modern, London

“The key question that I take to bed with me is: what is my responsibility as a living being-as a South African citizen reading continually about racism, xenophobia, and hate crimes in the mainstream media?”

- Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, painting, sculpture, video and installation to comment on issues on race, gender and sexuality. Muholi's early work dates back to the early 2000's, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's black LGBTQI+ community. In 2014, the artist turned their camera lens on themself and began creating their ongoing body of self-portraits Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness). 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.

Zanele Muholi, Faniswa, Parktown at the 2019 Venice Biennale

Zanele Muholi: Portrait as Resistance exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2022

“I’m very conscious of the process of making and hope that this connects to the politics of seeing and the politics of acting through seeing. These works ask me what it means to be present. I want people to see themselves differently through them too…We are in changing times, the world will have to start afresh, so these become a visual memoir so that those who come after us – seeing when and where these were produced – can get answers about how we lived, what we thought about and our circumstances.”

- Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi: Portrait as Resistance exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2022