Belfast Photo Festival’s touring exhibition of works by Zanele Muholi arrives in Glasgow

By Patricia Allmer, 19.10.2022

Zanele Muholi, Ntozakhe II, Parktown, 2016. Courtesy Street Level Photoworks.

Seventeen works from the artist’s Somnyama Ngonyama series (its title in isiZulu) are mounted on freestanding triangular structures, each 2.1m in height and showcasing three photographic panels. This ongoing series consists of self-portraits taken since 2012, and is part of Muholi’s work as a visual activist documenting, inscribing, making visible, claiming, and re-claiming presence, history, and voice for black LGBTI people. Here Muholi focusses on their own identity and history as a queer black South African – an identity and history constantly under threat of violation and erasure by racist, patriarchal, and homophobic oppressive structures and their perpetrators.

While the photographs (and Muholi themself) emanate beauty, evoking the stylised images of fashion magazines, they disrupt conventional racialised positions by detourning fashion aesthetics into significant social critiques, querying and queering colonial and patriarchal gazes, expressing decolonial concerns through the deeply personal, intimate, and autobiographical. Theirs is a participatory discourse, where the photograph is co-created between image-maker and photographed.

As Muholi notes, the entire series relates to their “concept of MaID (‘My Identity’), or read differently, ‘maid’, the quotidian and demeaning name given to all subservient black women in South Africa”. Everyday household items such as inflated rubber gloves, clothes hangers, and scouring pads populate the photographs as props and accessories, making visible repressed black female labour. A recurring figure to whom Muholi pays tribute is her South African mother, Bester, who worked for 40 years for a white family.

In ‘Bester I (Mayotte, 2015)’ the artist’s shoulders are draped with a cheap doormat and their hair adorned with clothes pegs – as Muholi has noted, “when you work for other families you have to cover your hair – nobody wants to see black hair in their food [...].” Elsewhere different characters and archetypes are explored in images often laced with wit and satire, offering ever-unfolding complex philosophical and political critiques of race, gender, and power. In the profile photograph ‘Qiniso (The Sails, Durban, 2019)’, the artist’s hair is decorated with hair picks (a symbol of Black Pride), arranged into a crown entangling evocations of Nefertiti (and of Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein) and ethnographic exoticisations, with Muholi’s own previous occupation as hairstylist; in ‘Ntozakhe II (Parktown, 2016)’ the crown-like headdress, seemingly made out of scouring pads, alludes to the Statue of Liberty.

In this exhibition, the positioning of the works at the edge of the Quad’s green dynamises exchanges between Muholi’s self-portraits, their gazes creating a field of tension in which the viewer’s own gaze is questioned. The exhibition’s outdoor setting realises Muholi’s major concern – black and queer identities’ access to space and place.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness) is exhibited at The University of Glasgow’s East Quad until 6 November. The show is a touring exhibition of the Belfast Photo Festival, delivered in partnership with Street Level Photoworks and The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.