Sir Zanele Muholi describes themself not as a visual artist but as a visual activist. For nearly 20 years, Muholi has photographed LGBTQ+ people in South Africa. Now, they want their photography to help change the culture of oppression that still exists there.
“All I ever wanted to do was to make sure that I become that voice for change in South Africa, in which every single being who is Black, who is queer, who is trans, is documented,” Muholi said of the power of their work in an exclusive interview with GBH News. Their work is now on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the exhibition, Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance.
In the aftermath of Apartheid, South Africa was the first nation in the world to constitutionally guarantee the right to equality and nondiscrimination to all people, with a specific prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Nonetheless, the LGBTQ+ community there remains subject to high rates of violence and murder — especially among young and Black people.
“It’s like you cannot ignore it," Muholi said of their photography. "It’s Black, it’s beautiful. It’s on your walls and it forces you to dialogue with your peers and start to wonder how you can, how you as a white person, deal with a Black image still, with Black people in your spaces, deal with Black colleagues in your workplace and deal with Black queers at Pride.”
After years of photographing others, Muholi decided it was time to turn the camera on themself.
"I needed to remember me," Muholi said. "I wanted to pay homage to my mom. Her spirit forever lives with me, or moves with me. If she didn’t suffer labor pains for me to be born, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
The show's co-curator, theo tyson, says that Muholi's work becomes more dimensional when you look at their stylized self-portraits.
“They’re not playing dress-up, if you will," tyson said. "There are clothes pins used to talk about domestic labor and share stories of their mother. There are the plastic gloves that we see as a sign of the times and what that represents from sexual violence, to access to healthcare to now COVID and what we need to do to protect ourselves.”
In these images, Muholi has increased the contrast of their skin-tone in post-production in order to continue the conversation with the viewer. “This is just engagement. How far can we go with our bodies? How far can we go with our voices? How fearful are we to say what makes us feel uncomfortable?" Muholi said. "So are we brave enough to face the world out there that doesn’t allow us to be either as Black, either as queer folks, either as anything.”
The exhibition also features Muholi’s latest work — their first sculpture and paintings never before seen in a museum.
Pieranna Cavalchini, the show’s co-curator, says that connecting Muholi’s painting to their photography expresses Muholi’s duality. “Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance is the idea of letting Muholi be," Cavalchini said. "It’s Muholi as an artist-activist, but at the same time there’s a humanity. There’s a sense of vulnerability.”
Muholi readily talks about this vulnerability. Their paintings were composed mainly last year, during a period of pain — so these works were a way of healing. Even if they’re sold at the end of the day.
When asked what it was like to step back and see these completed paintings in all their color, Muholi said that it’s been an interesting experience.
“You fall in love knowing that you might lose that lover," they said. "Once it’s out of your sight and it belongs to the other, it’s like losing love — and that love belongs to someone.”
