Zanele Muholi: dark lioness

By Mark Gevisser

Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits are so dark they glow. Called “Somnyama Ngonyama” (“Hail the Dark Lioness”), the series has been shown in ten cities across the world in the past year. Last autumn they stared out of digital billboards over Times Square in New York as part of the city’s Performa Biennial festival. They sold out in the previews at Muholi’s New York gallery and are about to be published as a book by Aperture. From a black, working-class family, Muholi is South Africa’s biggest international art star after William Kentridge and David Goldblatt, two white men a generation older.

The global art world first took note of Muholi when a series of portraits of lesbians from the artist’s own community were exhibited in 2012 at Documenta, the quinquennial German show that has launched many artists. These continue to be updated, and were recently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Now, with an acute sense of the way identity politics is expressed in both art and politics, Muholi has turned the camera inwards, in an examination of “what it means to be black, 365 days a year”. The “Dark Lioness” portraits are alter egos, and many have Zulu names. Some were taken in Muholi’s sparse flat in Johannesburg. Others were made on the road, a travelogue of the nomadic artist in hotel rooms across the world.