#visual activist

Zanele Muholi's Stunning Works

Zanele Muholi is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their work has been exhibited all over the world. With over 260 photographs, this exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date.

Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.

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Charm City Night Market

Going against the longstanding need to conceal queer identities, these artists use portraiture to affirm the complexity of queer desire and experience in the 20th and 21st centuries.

South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi has dedicated herself to creating visibility for the black queer communities in her native country and beyond. This portrait is from her monumental "Faces and Phases" series, an ambitious multi-year project that aimed at combatting discrimination and violence against lesbian women and transgender men in particular. “Collectively, the portraits are at once a visual statement and an archive,” Muholi has remarked, “marking, mapping and preserving an often invisible community for posterity.” The Brooklyn Museum organized the exhibition Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence in 2015. 

Genesis [Je n'isi isi] V, 2016 by Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai engages in a re-contextualisation of colonial imagery in his Genesis series, which takes as a departure point stone reliefs commemorating the expeditions of David Livingstone and counters them by imagining an Africa reconnected with its rich traditional past. The photographic series is a brief recount of the individuals that ventured with Livingstone into unexplored territories in central Africa. They included other Europeans who sought similar adventures and the porters and guides who bore the weight of their supplies as well as slaves freed from Arab slave traders. It imagines Livingstone's journey with guiding principles that Christianity and commerce were inseparable. 

Terra Dick and her girlfriend, by Zanele Muholi.

Lungiswa Gqunta

Endabeni 5, 2015 by Mohau Modisakeng

The photographer and sculptor uses his body to describe personal loss and collective trauma