S E E:
ZANELE MUHOLI
Johannesburg-based activist and artist Zanele Muholi has an exhibit now at SAM through August that features 76 portrait photographs taken by the artist between 2013 and 2017. These stunning, sometimes starkly powerful portraits fuse fashion photography with more conventional portraiture and weave in ethnographic themes that serve to establish powerful archetypes. Each portrait is symbolically named in isiZulu, the artist’s first language, and the works communicate questions about social injustice, human rights, and representation of the human body.
Zanele Muholi, equally esteemed for her activism, co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002 and Inkanyiso (www.inkanyiso.org), a forum for queer and visual (activist) media, in 2009. Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. In 2013, they became an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Most recently, Muholi was bestowed France’s highest cultural honor, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts des Lettres.