Presenting:
We Live in Fear ,Zanele Muholi, Video documents, 2013
Ayanda & Nhlanhla Moremi’s Wedding,Zanele Muholi, Video documents, 2015
About Artworks
We Live in Fear is a documentation Zanele made in 2013. It reveals how Zanele Muholi works as a visual activist and LGBT rights activists. In South Africa, the queer community is still living in fears. Discrimination, hate, “curative rape”, and murder are always happening. By taking portraits for the queer community, Zanele is sending her message and faith through visual art as a fearless weapon.
Ayanda & Nhlanhla Moremi’s Wedding documents the wedding of a lesbian couple Ayanda and Nhlanhla. Different from the straight people’s weddings, this type of wedding contains more meaning on gender/queer politics.
For the occasion of this screening, Arthub invited Katy Roseland write an essay about Zanele Muholi’s artwork.
Zanele Muholi’s Abandon and Origin of Queer Code
Zanele Muholi, self-titled as a visual activist based in Johannesburg South Africa. Applying the medium of photography, her work is an archival representation of black lesbian and trans people of South Africa. Facing a landscape of homophobia as well as racism, Muholi creates a visual society, structuring a new space for her subjects to exist in social empowerment. Her still photography
Faces and Phases, marks its 11th year in her practice, its inception the same year as the Civil Union Act came into force, legalizing same sex marriage. In 2002 she filmed the first lesbian wedding.
But the scope of the issues black lesbians face is far beyond social injustices, Muholi reports hate crimes, the epidemic of corrective rape and lesbian murders. She documents this violence with still settled safety.
Faces and Phases are biographies in black and white portraits. Subjects are plain clothed, uncostumed, as their existence is spectacle enough. Often with a steady gaze, the subject conveys a message of pride and power. In this frame the subject is safe from assault and brutality, they are not sexualized, no mention of race, gender, just raw human form. We are reminded of humanity.
“The portraits in
Faces and Phases render their subject in intentionally non-iconic modes. Muholi’s artworks mobilize against iconicity because if any singular image in
Faces and Phases were to be appropriated as a definitive representation of black lesbian existence, the project would be misunderstood as a typology of black lesbian sexuality. In response, Muholi favors local collaborators and everyday scenes, an emphasis that allows alternative modes for visual engagement. Such visual alternatives are less bound by normative values or regimes of looking (Mirzoeff 2011:473–96). Muholi’s descriptive images are not aimed at producing a fixed or conventional type, but rather a sense and view of a multitude (Smith 2011:67). Just as Mofokeng’s images are far removed from a compendium of idealized exotic types,
Faces and Phases resists the iconization of black lesbians, and thereby resists political endeavors that name, tame and classify.”
“When Spanish conquistadors first came across Native American villages in the 17th century, they observed behavior that deeply disturbed and disgusted them: men, dressed as women and performing women’s work, and having sex with other men. Other European explorers also noted this behavior in other parts of the New World, and it seems that gender identity for pre-colonial Native Americans was far more fluid than the rigid binary gender divisions that colonists considered “normal.” Because colonists brought their own worldviews and biases to the New World, the terminology used to describe much of what they encountered can be contested—none more so, perhaps, than the word used to describe the instances of men dressing and acting as women that they saw: berdache.” (Baird, Jocelyn, 2010.
Just Semantics? The Battle between Two-Spirit and Berdache. Intertext Magazine: 42-47. )
The modern aboriginal term within Native America, translated to “two spirited” describes an individual who exudes a particular gender role, specifically one outside of heteronormativity, is evidence of a precolonial understanding of sexual identity and queer performativity. “Two-Spirit” has no recognized negative connotations and it wasn’t as constricted as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, but rather an encompassing identity of over eight non-heterosexual orientations.
We can here see colonialism as the root the of homophobia, and thus working towards the liberation of diverse practices of gender and sexuality (and more broadly: attitudes and performativities), is key to the process of decolonization.
In the context of Zanele’s work, we can see that by taking on the role of documenting and historicising from a perspective that has been previously excluded or suppressed, we are able to reorder visual society from a different foundation and, through the production of new imageries, we are able to construct new spatiality. The viewer is always-already plugged in, and always ready to be manipulated or reprogrammed by visual and cultural materials.
What is a visual activist? What is an artist? Indexing society for those unreported, those living under bridges kicked out of shelters for being lesbians. Photography functions as participation, image as action. This is visual activism.
