Richard's Art Noticeboard: Zanele Muholi - Tate Modern (

Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama II, Oslo, 2015

Zanele Muholi is at Tate Modern until 31 May 2021

Somnyama Ngonyama – ‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ - is a series of riveting self-portraits by Zanele Muholi. Muholi’s gaze is direct and strong. These are unsettling portraits of striking formal strength and dignity – this despite the figure being adorned with sometimes absurd or mundane materials: clothes pegs, rubber gloves, plastic tubes; a crown of scouring pads or hair picks.

Zanele Muholi’s exhibition opened last year (2020) at Tate Modern – and was thus disrupted by the pandemic. This is a shame as Muholi is an extraordinary artist. However, Tate Modern will re-open on 17 May and Muholi’s exhibition will run again - but for a mere 2 weeks, until 31 May.

South African, non-binary, queer, activist, Muholi has movingly described how photography ‘saved their life’, (Saner) and the stories told through their work are both devastating and inspiring – devastating because they are testimony to vicious bigotry and the cruel obscenity of such crimes as ‘corrective rape’ - the male assault on lesbians intended to enforce heterosexuality; inspiring, because the work is also testimony to the courage of their subjects and their dignified determination to be true to themselves in defiance of homophobia.

Aftermath, from the series Only Half the Picture shows a scar running down a woman’s thigh – the legacy of a brutal, sexual assault. Some of the pictures in this series are hard to look at – but can be seen here.

Faces and Phases is an ongoing series of portraits of black lesbians and transgender people in South Africa. They all have stories to tell – Lungile Dladla, recounts (as Sean O’Hagan reports) how on an evening in February 2010, she and a friend were accosted by an armed stranger, who ushered them into a field and ordered them to lie face down with their hands behind their backs. “We did as told,” she writes, “because we feared for our lives as he had a gun in his hand and threatened to use it if we did not do as he said. He undressed us and said, ‘Today ngizoni khipha ubutabane.’” (“Today I will rid you of this gayness.”)

But it is the self-portraits of Somnyama Ngonyamathat that are the most impressive pictures: they are both absurd and deeply serious. Muholi presents a regal profile wearing a flaming crown – made of afro combs; she stares out at you wearing only a miner’s helmet: a statement of solidarity with the victims of the 2012 Marikana massacre in which 34 striking miners were murdered by police. In another picture Muholi is seemingly under attack from... inflated rubber gloves!

Powerful stuff.

Reviews and articles

Ashby, Chloë (2020) “Zanele Muholi's Tate Modern show gives a voice to queer South Africa”, The Art Newspaper

Cumming, Laura (2020) “Zanele Muholi… portraiture as activism”, The Observer

Dillon, Brian (2017) “Zanele Muholi”, Art Review

Januszczak,Waldemar (2020) “Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits are magical”, Waldemar Januszczak

O’Hagan, Sean (2018) “Muholi’s Searching Gaze”, The Guardian

O’Hagan, Sean (2020) “Zanele Muholi’s queer South Africa: ‘I do not dare shoot at night. It is not safe’”, The Guardian

Saner, Emine (2020)”I’m scared but this work needs to be shown…”, The Guardian

Searle, Adrian (2020) “Strap-ons, style and self-invention: Zanele Muholi”, The Guardian

Snoad, Laura (2016) “My Best shot: Zanele Muholi”, The Guardian