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'Zanele Muholi: Beleza Valente' opens at Instituto Moreira Salles Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil
24 Feb 2025 (1 min) read
Beleza Valente (Courageous Beauty) by Zanele Muholi opened on 22 February at the Instituto Moreira Salles Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, marking the artist’s first major survey of work in South America.
With over 100 works, this retrospective exhibition presents the full breadth of Muholi’s career to date. Muholi, who describes themselves as a visual activist, has spent over a decade documenting the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ communities in South Africa and beyond.
The exhibition brings together their main photographic series, including new works from Faces and Phases, an ongoing series of photographic portraits which began back in 2006. As a collective portrait, the series celebrates, commemorates and archives the lives of Black lesbian, transgender and gender non-conforming people.
The exhibition also includes several other key series including Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi’s acclaimed series of dramatic self-portraits; Brave Beauties, which celebrates non-binary people and trans women; and Being, a series of tender images of couples which challenge colonialist and heteronormative stereotypes and taboos.
Within these series, Muholi tells both collective and individual stories. They challenge preconceived notions of deviance and victimhood, encourage viewers to address their own misconceptions, and create a shared sense of understanding and solidarity.
Muholi is one of several seminal figures in world photography to hold an exhibition at IMS Paulista in 2025. Other artists include Gordon Parks (USA), known for documenting the daily lives of Black people during the regime of social segregation in the US; Agnès Varda (Belgium), a filmmaker who began her career as a photographer; and Luiz Braga (Brazil), author of a vast body of work that reveals the diversity of the Amazon territory and its inhabitants. In addition, IMS will present an exhibition of photographs produced by the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of Rondônia, showing their trajectory and daily lives through historical and contemporary images.
The exhibition runs until 22 June 2025.