The presentation in the park is thematic, featuring four themes in four different zones, each revealing the different relationships between humans and nature: ‘Motion’, ‘Urban Nature’, ‘Entaglement’ and Human Nature’, the latter being where Muholi’s Bambatha is located. This area of the outdoor presentation includes historic masterpieces by Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore, alongside works by acclaimed artists Bruce Nauman, Louise Lawler and Kati Heck.

The Middelheim Museum celebrates 75 years in 2025.

ABOUT THE BAMBATHA SCULPTURE

Muholi’s large-scale bronze sculpture Bambatha depicts a monstrous engulfment of the artist’s body, or rather their biologically determined “box” – a term the artist uses to refer to the space encompassing their breasts and vagina. In this Queer avatar, Muholi’s figure appears trapped by malignant tubing that forms a strange, amorphous mass around them – a reference both to the artist’s struggle with fibroids and gender dysphoria. The piece is a poignant reminder of the somatic unease, anxiety and depression which results from incongruence with one’s body.

The sculpture portrays the agony and ecstasy of existing in a Black, Queer, female body, and the powerful nature of Muholi’s traverse through the world as both an artist and activist. In the past few years, Muholi’s media-focus has broadened to reclaim ownership of their story beyond their prize-winning photography. Their three-dimensional expansion into bronze honours this familial origin, along with commemorating Black women and LGBTQI+ individuals’ contributions to art, politics, medical sciences and culture.

With self-portraiture as its predominant mode, their work presents a personal reckoning with themes including sexual pleasure and freedom, inherited taboos around female genitalia and biological processes, gender-based violence and the resultant trauma, pain and loss, sexual rights and biomedical education. Bambatha I (2023) was made for Muholi’s eponymous solo exhibition at Southern Guild Cape Town, which called for new rites of self-expression, sexuality, mothering and healing that usher in kinder modes of survival in our contemporary world.

The exhibition, which travelled to the gallery’s Los Angeles location in May 2024, was in part a response to South Africa’s ongoing femicide, the stigmatisation of LGBTQI+ communities and the proliferation of gender-based violence, especially the ‘curative’ or ‘corrective’ rape of Black lesbians. Muholi’s own struggle with uterine fibroids and reckoning with their Catholic upbringing also deeply inform Bambatha’s emotive symbology.