Photographer and cultural activist Zanele Muholi who is currently dominating in the Netherlands being the first black artist to have a solo show at Stedelijk Museum in now heading to the USA to take over New York.
Xiniwe II at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Muholi to showcase at PERFORMA, the internationally acclaimed organization dedicated to live performance across disciplines. AFROGLOSSIA and a South African Pavilion Without Walls both will feature in Performa 17, the seventh edition of the Performa Biennial, to take place November 1–19, 2017, at locations throughout New York City.
Muholi’s calendar prior her PERFORMA official take over opening night will include being at Tang Museum / Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
High Museum & University of Georgia, Atlanta, GA and
Solo Exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.
Series to be shown include ‘Brave Beauties,’ a photo-essay featuring gender-nonconforming pageant winners and transgender woman; ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ (‘Hail, The Dark Lioness’), the body of work confronting the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive though self-portraiture and ‘Faces and Phases,’ the portrait series looking at black South African lesbian and transgender individuals.
Basizeni XI, Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
In a recent article in The Guardian, published in recognition of her acclaimed exhibition at Autograph ABP in London, Muholi remarks:
‘I always think to myself, if you don’t see your community, you have to create it. I can’t be dependent on other people to do it for us.’ It is a continuing resistance ‘because we cannot be denied existence. This is about our lives, and if queer history, trans history, if politics of blackness and self-representation are so key in our lives, we just cannot sit down and not document and bring it forth.’
Photographs of new and longstanding participants of ‘Faces and Phases’ will be shown together as projections. Muholi has recently facilitated and curated exhibitions with some of these participants, young artists and activists in Amsterdam, Johannesburg and Cape Town, around themes of pride, loss and resistance. Muholi thus affirms that her project is one of cultivating visibility and dialogue across generations and geography.
‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ and ‘Brave Beauties’ have most recently been shown in solo exhibitions at the Stedelijik Museum in Amsterdam alongside various festivals and biennials and in her recent solo show at STEVENSON Cape Town. The works in this series are taken at different locations around the world, incorporating everyday objects in unusual ways to spark conversations about historical events, contemporary phenomena and personal occurrences. In their first solo showing at our Cape Town gallery, the works offer even greater resonance in a city mired in the politics of race, space and commodity.
Julile I, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Muholi has exhibited work at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; the Kyotographie International Photography Festival in Japan; Prince Claus Fund Gallery in Amsterdam; the Berlin Biennale; Documenta 13 in Germany; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in Italy; the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein and the Guggenheim Bilbao, among other museums and institutions.
For more information PERFORMA: http://performa-arts.org/
For more information on Zanele Muholi: yayamavundla@gmail.com
