Zanele Muholi
Bio
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Durban, South Africa) is a visual activist, humanitarian, and art practitioner whose work documents and celebrates the lives of Black LQBTQIA+ communities. For Muholi, their use of the pronouns they/them goes beyond gender identity. It acknowledges their ancestors and the many facets of their identity: “There are those who came before me who make me.” In order to honor this element of their identity and vision, this exhibition uses intentionally gender-inclusive language.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop (2001–03), completed an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto (2009), received an Honorary Professorship in video and photography from the University of the Arts Bremen (2013), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège (2023).
Beginning in 2006, they responded to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by South Africa’s LGBTQIA+ community by photographing Black lesbian, bisexual, and Queer women, Trans and gender non-conforming people, resulting in the ongoing portrait project, ‘Faces and Phases’. The more recent series ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ (Hail the Dark Lioness) shifts the lens, with Muholi becoming both participant and image-maker.
Statement
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Durban, South Africa) is a visual activist, humanitarian, and art practitioner whose work documents and celebrates the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ communities. Zanele Muholi's photographs understand identity not as something fixed, but as something shaped by days, by phases, by moments of visibility and invisibility. They organize their practice around multi-year photographic series that each focus on a different element of queer life, evolving with and reacting to their ongoing experiences as a photographer and changing social realities. Through photography, portraiture, and self-representation, Muholi records what it means to exist in a world that does not always offer safety, recognition, or belonging. In these works, the face becomes a site of testimony. Rather than presenting idealized or stable identities, their work honours fluctuation: how people change, how they adapt, how they survive across time. To be photographed here is not to be frozen, but to be acknowledged within a larger, ongoing story.
