Zanele Muholi celebrates South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in LA and London

Artist and visible activist Zanele Muholi celebrates the lives of South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in a sequence of arresting portraits that purpose to offset the stigma round queer identification in African society. 

Now, Muholi is exhibiting new bronze sculptures and including to their self-portrait sequence, Somnyama Ngonyama (examples from which had been proven in New York in 2021, alongside Muholi’s work) at their retrospective at Southern Guild, Los Angeles.

Muholi considers their very own kind in portraits taken all world wide, in new work that lightly subverts the quotidian, whether or not sporting crowns of clothesline pins, mattress sheet cloaks or lipstick comprised of toothpaste and vaseline. 

In the end uplifting, Muholi’s work emphasises a brand new positivity, aiming ‘to rewrite a Black queer and trans visible historical past of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence on the top of hate crimes in SA and past’.