(Work by Zanele
Muholi)
Photographer and visual activist, Prof Zanele Muholi brings
her solo exhibition Homecoming to the
Durban Art Gallery.
It will be the first time that she has hosted a solo
exhibition in KZN. Muholi is set to stage the biggest exhibition in her home
city showing for the first time in the history of her career in Durban. The
exhibition will feature five different bodies of work namely Faces and Phases; Somnyama Ngonyama; Love
and Loss; M(o)urning and Brave Beauties – cumulatively telling different
stories. The exhibition occupies the entire gallery space situated within the Durban
City Hall.
“I don’t want to always present tragedy from South Africa. I
want to show things that are joyous, that makes a person who might have thought
of the jungle think of something else,” Muholi told Vogue in a recent interview
about the diversity of her work.
The exhibition presents evolutions in the artist’s ongoing
photographic projects, affirming Muholi’s commitment to activism through visual
history. It adds interactive and educational elements, as well as an activism
wall that shares experiences from the lives of the Brave Beauties – transwomen
and gender non-binary individuals.
This exhibition invites the public to engage with the
alternating brutality and joy faced by the black LGBT community in South
Africa.
Muholi is a visual activist. She was born in 1972 in Umlazi,
Durban, and currently lives in Johannesburg. She co-founded the Forum for
Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso, a forum for
queer and visual / activist media. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is ‘to
re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world
to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and
beyond’. She continues to train and co-facilitates photography workshops for
young women in the townships.
Muholi has won numerous awards – most recently she has been
honoured for her advocacy work with the LGBT community by the French Government
when they bestowed upon her the “Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters”
recognising her ongoing engagement and creativity in helping to develop the
arts and literature in France and abroad.
Her Faces and Phases
series has shown at Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice
Biennale; and the 29th São Paulo Biennial. Solo exhibitions have taken place at
institutions including the Mead Art Museum, Amherst; Gallatin Galleries, New
York; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Akershus
Kunstsenter, Norway; Einsteinhaus, Ulm; Schwules Museum, Berlin; Williams College
Museum of Art.
The exhibition runs until February 28, 2018. The Durban Art Gallery is situated on the second floor of the Durban City
Hall, entrance in Anton Lembede (formerly Smith)
Street opposite the Playhouse. More information on 031 311 2262/6.
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