Zanele Muholi is best known for the series, Faces and Phases, portraits of hundreds of black lesbians and trans people in Muholi’s native South Africa. The power of the project lies in its scale and ambition. “Collectively, the portraits are at once a visual statement and an archive,” Muholi told the New Yorker in 2012, “marking, mapping and preserving an often invisible community for posterity.”
Now, with another epic series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi, who identifies as non-binary, has turned the camera on themself. The images are not so much self-portraits as self-projections, with the artist employing costumes, props and fabrics to inhabit personas that rest often provocatively between the archetypal and the imagined. Although Muholi is an extraordinarily powerful presence throughout, the series speaks of multiple identities, multiple selves. Some are pointedly political – Muholi’s face wreathed in plastic wrapping to evince the feeling of worthlessness that the artist experiences when subjected to racial profiling at border crossings. Others are more playfully subversive – a head crowned with clothes-pegs in homage to Muholi’s mother, who worked for years as a domestic for a white South African family.
This image is called Vile, Gothenburg, Sweden 2015. Its title alone carries a charge, and the white masking tape that criss-crosses and surrounds Muholi’s body, head and face, is freighted with meanings – bandages, body adornment – that are made even more complex by the artist’s searching gaze.
Throughout the series, everyday materials are used as symbols of objectification, oppression and exploitation. The images were made, Muholi says, “in response to historical, current or personal experiences”. More often than not, they have the felt intensity of the latter. Somnyama Ngonyama is a conceptual series that is intensely personal and deeply political. It is an angry and poetic work of art for our time.
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, is published next month by Aperture (£60)
