Southern Guild Presents ZANELE MUHOLI: A Solo Exhibition

WORDS Cheri Wolf PHOTOS Hayden Phipps

Southern Guild presents ZANELE MUHOLI, a self-titled, autobiographical exhibition that explores Muholi’s tempestuous existence in a Black, queer female body, and the formidable nature of Muholi’s negotiation of patriarchy, Catholicism, gender dysphoria, gender-based violence, trauma, sexual rights, pleasure, and more.

Occupying the entire gallery, ZANELE MUHOLI features new sculptural and photographic works with several monumental bronze sculptures – the artist’s largest presentation of new sculpture to date.

The Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) photographic series is punctuated by the retrospects of select pieces from Muholi‘s oeuvre of renowned imagery and video work. The dialogue between old and new traces the evolution of the artist’s personal landscape while self-portraiture, the predominant mode, presents a personal reckoning with sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, pain and loss, and biomedical education.

“The uterus is the rite of passage that is common to all of us regardless of race, class, gender. It is a common space, it is like water – water is water, blood is blood, the womb is the womb, birth is birth. You are born from someone, you come from that passage,” explains Muholi.

A demand for a serious reconsideration of more compassionate modes of survival in a contemporary world is explored through the lenses of South Africa’s pandemic of femicide, the stigmatisation of LGBTQI+ communities and the proliferation of gender-based violence, especially ‘corrective’ rape of Black lesbians. Their personal journey with uterine fibroids and a reckoning with their Catholic upbringing also greatly shapes the exhibition’s emotive symbology.

Photographs from an early series, Being (T)here, Amsterdam, displayed in the public-facing windows of the gallery document an intervention that Muholi undertook in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. They depict the artist as a sex worker wearing ‘umutsha’ (an isiZulu beaded waistbelt) and a black satin corset, posing in a window. Although their poses are powerful and alluring, there is a point at which they break away from the voyeur’s gaze to retreat back into a seat in their cubicle – evidence of exhaustion from performed exoticism.

“All that is seen as ‘performance’ in the art world is something that we ourselves grew up with,” Muholi says.

In contrast Somnyama Ngonyama, the ongoing self-portraiture series the artist began in 2012, resists the exoticising gaze. Utilising elements of performance with the immediacy of both political protest and African informal trade and craft markets, the guerrilla nature of the images’ composition reveals the urgency to document the self: “Portraiture is my daily prayer.” Muholi says, “This is no longer about me; it is about every female body that ever existed in my family. That never imagined that these dreams were possible.”

Muholi’s three-dimensional expansion into bronze honours this familial origin, along with commemorating Black women and LGBTQI+ individuals’ contributions to art, politics, medical sciences and culture. One sculpture depicts Muholi as a mythical being emerging from a body of water, while another depicts a large-scale uterus: a “self-portrait of being” and an invitation to reconsider the womb as a symbol of honour, protection, growth and non-prescriptive femininity.

The exhibition runs from 15 June to 17 August at Southern Guild in the Silo District. For more information, go here.

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