In her gaze the melancholy of a distant country and the pride of redemption: Muholi is a shocking artist who changes the way you observe the world, her thoughts become photography, art, portraits in an endless search.
You can’t just watch.
At Mudec Photo in Milan until 30 July the exhibition “Muholi. A Visual Activist” curated by Biba Blazers (Mudec Photo catalog) presents over 60 large-format images, hypnotic shots and social protests chosen by the artist and Jackets ranging from the first self-portraits to the most recent works, all taken from the artistic project by Muholi “Somnyama Ngnyama” (Ave Black Lioness).
In 2012 the first self-portrait but the drawing is not finished yet, it is constantly evolving. Unequivocally Muholi sums it up thus «You are important. No one has the right to harm you because of your race, the way you express your gender, or your sexuality because, first and foremost, you are.”
Activist and Artist
Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi in South Africa in 1972, a township not far from Durban. Apartheid marks her existence: segregation, the innumerable and ruthless identity checks, oppression and, at the same time, the desire to affirm a free personality, far from prejudices are the themes that the photographer continues to propose in every shot. A hard life from the start, she is the eighth daughter of a very humble couple, a few months after her birth Muholi remains orphaned of her father, Bester, her mother, is forced to go to work in a white family away from the affections her. Apartheid forced blacks to do only service work, which meant that African women had to leave the family for a modest salary. To the adored mother, to women who, like her, had to leave their children Muholi dedicates a series of painful and unforgettable self-portraits such as “Bester 1” (Mayotte 2015, black inkjet print): the gaze fixed on the camera, almost catatonic, on his head a crown composed of wooden pegs for hanging clothes. The wonderful, emancipated Bester will support Muholi with love during the process of becoming aware of her sexuality and will help her move to Johannesburg at the age of nineteen. Today it is no longer Zenele (which in Zulu, her mother tongue, is feminine) but only Muholi, an individual who has chosen to define himself in the plural.
Muholi, the photographs of the “Visual activist” at the Mudec
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Not just for documenting
In Johannesburg she works as a hairdresser, on display a self-portrait “Qiniso The Salis” (Durban 2019 gelatin silver print), in which the artist transforms her head into a dome built with wooden combs to recall the cruelty of a society who could not stand the curly hair of Africans and wanted to submit them to European aesthetic canons. In the same period Muholi becomes an activist of the LGBTQIA community *, she founds collectives, she is a blogger, she uses the camera to document the violence of which her “friends-brothers” are victims; With her photos of her, she wants to restore her dignity to the queer world that suffers daily abuses, “corrective rapes”, threats and insults. In 2001 Muholi manages to enter the Market Photo Workshop, the great school of photography founded by the South African photographer David Goldblatt, she will be her mentor, friend and trusted colleague. Muholi’s career is on the rise, the art world begins to discover her until in 2012 she suffers the theft, the destruction of her archive including five hundred negatives with never published stories. The eclectic artist is in pieces during a stay in Umbria she decides to use her camera as healing, rebirth, struggle; she returned to South Africa she begins to realize her dream “Somnyama Ngnyama” to rewrite history, give the world hope, to reflect – through the “blackness” of her body – on the collective black identity. Today each of her self-portraits from the harsh light, the exasperated black, her face with the objects of daily misery look at us, protagonists of one of the most important photographic exhibitions of the Museo delle Culture in Milan; including “Fisani” (Parktown, Johannesburg 2016 inkjet print) in which Muholi wraps himself in dozens of safety pins and says «They are equivalent to solidarity. This self-portrait claims the unity of people and between people, regardless of how they identify themselves».