ZANELE MUHOLI - VIP PROGRAMME EVENT
‘Looking Inward: A Self-Portrait Workshop with Zanele Muholi’
Friday, 20 February, 11AM – 1PM
Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC)

Visual activist Zanele Muholi hosts a self-portrait workshop that responds directly to the fair’s theme, Listen, as well as to the wider dialogue about the role of art fairs in the international art market. The series is designed to encourage interaction between practitioners and audiences, provoking questions and offering exciting ways of engaging with the art fair model. The workshops have been designed to explore both practical sessions, encouraging audience engagement, creativity, and open discussion, giving participants a chance to actively reflect and engage with current ideas in South Africa’s and the wider world’s art landscape.

Muholi’s practice centres on the act of looking inward through self-portraiture. This session, in collaboration with ORMS, will provide cameras for participants as Muholi leads a workshop on photographing oneself as an act of self-discovery. The session will combine both practical and conceptual approaches to image-making.

As a visual activist, humanitarian and art practitioner, Muholi’s work documents and celebrates the lives Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Queer, and intersex communities. Since 2006, they have addressed the discrimination and violence faced by LGBTQIA+ people through their ongoing portrait series Faces and Phases, which affirms Black Queer identities and challenges stigma in African societies.

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, offsetting the culturally dominant images of Black women in the media today.

MANYAKU MASHILO - ICTAF TALKS PROGRAMME
TALK 4: ‘Listening Inward: Intuition, Spirituality, and the Unseen in Contemporary Art’
Saturday, 21 February, 5 - 6PM
Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC)

Manyaku Mashilo – who is featured in the SOLO section of the fair – will take part in a panel discussion moderated by Thandazani Dhlakama (Curator of Global Africa, Royal Ontario Museum). The conversation will explore the unseen forces that shape artistic practice, with speakers Khanyisile Mbongwa (Curator) and Zohra Opoku (Artist) joining Mashilo to complete this all-women panel.

Mashilo’s work spans mixed-media painting, drawing and collage, with her practice exploring themes of spiritual identity, memory, ancestry and belonging. Drawing inspiration from photographic archives to create expansive, abstract scenes. Mashilo’s works depict Black figures migrating through celestial, liminal spaces, symbolising both spiritual and ancestral journeys. Using family photos and historical imagery, Mashilo blends personal and collective memory to construct “cosmological landscapes” that imagine new futures and renegotiate identity and representation.