Zanele Muholi

Born in Umlazi, Durban and now residing in Cape Town, Muholi currently works between Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Between 2001 and 2003, they studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. They received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège in Belgium (2023), were appointed Honorary Professor of video and photography at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany (2013), and completed an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto (2009).

Beginning in 2006, Muholi responded to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTQIA+ community by photographing Black lesbian and transgender individuals, resulting in the ongoing portrait project, Faces and Phases. With these arresting portraits, Muholi hopes to offset the stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.

The more recent series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) shifts the lens with Muholi becoming both participant and image-maker. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, this ongoing series of self-portraits references specific events in South Africa’s political history. By exaggerating the darkness of their skin tone, Muholi reclaims their Blackness, and offsets the culturally dominant images of Black women in the media today.

Muholi is invested in educational activism, community outreach and youth development. In 2021, they set up the Muholi Art Institute (MAI) in Cape Town, which focuses on art education, following on from the founding of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women in 2002 and Inkanyiso, an online forum for Queer and visual media, in 2009. They facilitate access to art spaces for youth practitioners through projects such as Ikhono LaseNatali and continue to provide photography workshops for young women and in the townships through PhotoXP.

Awards and accolades received include an artist residency at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the International Center of Photography’s Spotlights Award, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, the Lucie Award for Humanitarian Photography, a fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society, UK and France’s Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Solo exhibitions of Muholi’s work have taken place at major institutions around the world, including Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Instituto Moreira Salles Paulista, São Paulo; the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík; Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Seattle Art Museum; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Luma Westbau, Zurich; Fotografiska Stockholm; the Durban Art Gallery, South Africa; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The artist’s Faces and Phases series has been shown in the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, at dOCUMENTA (13), and at the 29th São Paulo Biennial.

Muholi has exhibited extensively in group shows across the globe, including at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), US; Fotografiska, New York, US; Guggenheim, New York, US; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, US; National Gallery of Victoria Triennial, Melbourne, Australia; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; LUMA, Arles, France; S.M.A.K Ghent, Belgium; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo, Norway; The Walther Collection, Ulm, Germany; and Museo Amparo, Mexico, among others.

Publications include Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness (Aperture, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, and the follow-up Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (Aperture, 2024); Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases 2006-14 (Steidl and The Walther Collection, 2014); Zanele Muholi: African Women Photographers #1 (Casa Africa and La Fábrica, 2011); Faces and Phases (Prestel, 2010); and Only Half the Picture (Stevenson, 2006).