To support or join Kairos, contact: lisg.nottingham@gmail.com or 07938 556788
From 21 May – 1 July 2018 Zanele Muholi’s exhibition also extends from NAE’s gallery spaces onto the streets of Nottingham by way of a huge billboard located on Ilkeston Road / 143 Kimbolton Avenue in Radford (NG7 3HE).
“Arriving here, already traumatised, our members face the trials of the often-inhumane UK asylum system, throughout which the fear of being forced to return home to danger is ever present. Endurance is stretched to and beyond its limits, causing a lot of suffering. We see great strength and courage in the women surviving these ordeals. Kairos is committed to raising awareness in Nottingham of the violent homophobia faced by LGBT+ people in many parts of the world. We are grateful to New Art Exchange for inviting us to participate in Zanele Muholi’s exhibition; she is a beacon of hope in the long struggle ahead for justice for LGBT+ people in African countries. Inclusivity is important, let’s make Nottingham a safe and welcoming sanctuary for LGBT+ refugees.” Kairos founder, Di Campbell
We invited a local community group, Kairos, to select an image from the show for the billboard. Kairos provide support to women fleeing persecution and often life threatening violence because of their sexuality. Members are lesbian and bi women seeking asylum or with refugee status, and supporters in the Nottingham lesbian community. Their key purpose is to help asylum claims, and they also provide a safe space to meet, socialise and attend LGBT+ events together, enabling integration into the community. Tram Line
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“I felt honoured and excited to be invited to choose the picture! I completely relate to Zanele’s experience in this world as a queer black woman. Zanele’s work is impressive. I particularly loved the contrast between their skin and the background. Our image choice was unanimous - Zanele looks so fierce and powerful.” Kairos Member, Joséphine
Related Events
Our billboard is presented as part of In Another Place, a collaboration between the Contemporary Visual Arts Network East Midlands and ten regional venues, each transforming everyday advertising spaces into vibrant displays through original art. For more information on this region-wide project and to find the location of each artwork visit: www.inanotherplace.co.uk
FREE, 18yrs+ (please note this screening
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Visible: Screening & Discussion Thursday 10 May, 6pm – 7.30pm This documentary features inspirational historical figures from the LGBT community, artists and activists working to challenge mainstream perception and the sanitisation of LGBT legacies. Panel discussion follows. contains graphic imagery)
Curator’s Tour: Renée Mussai Thursday 17 May, 6.30pm – 7.30pm A gallery tour led by Renée Mussai, Senior Curator and Head of Archive & Research at Autograph ABP, London. FREE, All are welcome
Ekow Eshun Africa: Image And Identity Discussion Thursday 7 June, 6.30pm – 8pm Writer, critic and curator Ekow Eshun explores the cultural context of Muholi’s work; a contemporary Africa where history and modernity, the personal and political exist in vivid tension. FREE, All are welcome
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Please note, Zanele Muholi’s publication is available to purchase from reception
A UT O G R A P H A B P
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New Art Exchange 39-41 Gregory Boulevard Nottingham NG7 6BE
0115 924 8630 info@nae.org.uk www.nae.org.uk
Zanele Muholi Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail The Dark Lioness
In Another Place Billboards Display & Kairos – Nottingham’s Lesbian Immigration Support Group.
MAIN & MEZZANINE GALLERIES 28 APRIL - 24 JUNE 2018
FREE EXHIBITION GUIDE
Zanele Muholi is a visual activist from South Africa. Here we present their ongoing self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama. In this ever growing collection, Muholi uses their body as a canvas to confront the politics of race and representation in the visual archive. The title of the exhibition translates as ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ in isiZulu, one of South Africa’s eleven official languages and Muholi’s mother tongue. Each artwork in the show is captioned with its isiZulu title and an English translation.
“I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged ‘other’. My reality is that I do not mimic being black; it is my skin, and the experience of being black is deeply entrenched in me. Just like our ancestors, we live as black people 365 days a year, and we should speak without fear.” Zanele Muholi
Taken primarily between 2014 and 2018 the portraits in Somnyama Ngonyama pose critical questions about social justice, human rights and contested representations of the black body. Selfreflective and psychologically charged, Muholi’s portraits are unapologetic in their artistry as they explore different archetypes / personae and offer visual reflections inspired by personal experiences and socio-political events. In Somnyama Ngonyama, readymade objects and found materials are transformed into culturally loaded props, merging the political with the aesthetic – often commenting on specific events in South Africa’s recent history. Scouring pads and latex gloves address themes of domestic servitude, while simultaneously alluding to sexual politics, violence against black bodies and the suffocating prisms of gendered identity. Rubber tyres, electrical cords or cable ties reference forms of social brutality and capitalist exploitation, and powerfully evoke the plight of workers – maids, miners and members of different disenfranchised communities. Chopsticks, can lids, plastic bags
and polythene wrappings draw our attention to urgent environmental issues. Accessories such as cowrie shells or beads highlight Western fascinations with clichéd, exoticised representations of African cultures and people as well as the global economies of migration, commerce and labour. The portraits in Somnyama Ngonyama skillfully employ the conventions of classical portraiture, fashion photography and the familiar tropes of ethnographic imagery to rearticulate contemporary identity politics. By increasing the contrast in postproduction, the dark complexion of Muholi’s skin becomes the focal point of a multilayered interrogation into complex notions of beauty, desire and the dangerous terrains, racisms, and interlinked ‘phobias’ navigated daily. Muholi responds to these constraining narratives of history, ideologies and contemporary realities with a sinister, often tragi-comical humour, embarking, in their own words, on ‘a discomforting self-defining journey, rethinking the culture of self-representation and selfexpression’. Thus, Somnyama Ngonyama represents Muholi’s personal visual memoir – an Archive of The Self – a growing collection of photographic portraits emerging in constant dialogue with their surroundings, at once affirmation and reclamation, and testament to a myriad of tribulations brought forth by displacement and subjugation. Gazing defiantly at the camera, Muholi continually challenges the viewers’ perceptions while firmly asserting their cultural identity on their own terms.
The exhibition features four portraits specially commissioned by Autograph ABP for their inaugural London showing of Somnyama Ngonyama last year. These portraits are located here in NAE’s Mezzanine Gallery and they highlight the plight of women in the struggle for freedom [of movement] and equality under Apartheid. The three-portrait series, Bayephi I, II and III, commemorates the 1956 Women’s March on Pretoria, a pivotal moment in South Africa’s history where thousands of women from different cultural backgrounds united to demonstrate against repressive ‘pass laws’, which severely restricted their ability to move freely. These portraits were taken in June 2017 at the Old Fort prison complex at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, where many women were incarcerated as political prisoners for transgressing pass laws. “The 1956 protest was based on women saying, ‘enough is enough; enough with these passbooks’. This new commission connects Somnyama Ngonyama directly with black lives and black bodies in incarceration.” Zanele Muholi
About Zanele Muholi Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban, and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Muholi sees their practice as visual activism to effect social change. Over the past decade, Muholi has become known globally for Faces and Phases, their pioneering portrait photography of South Africa’s LBTQI communities. Muholi co-founded the Forum of Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and founded Inkanyiso (www. inkanyiso.org), in 2009, a forum for queer visual activist media. Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, Toronto. Muholi is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, and has been the recipient of the prestigious Prince Claus Award and the Carnegie Fine Prize.
In the fourth portrait, entitled ZaKi, Muholi continues to explore the poetics of transgression and exile in Kyoto, Japan, visualising an imagined AfroJapanese hyphenated identity. Somnyama Ngonyama is an Autograph ABP touring exhibition curated by Renée Mussai, Senior Curator and Head of Archive & Research at Autograph ABP, London.
Front cover: Somnyama Ngonyama II, Oslo, 2015. Ntozakhe II, Parktown, 2016. Bester I, Mayotte, 2015. © Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.
Muholi was included in the South African pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and took part in the São Paolo Biennial (2010) and documenta 13, Kassel (2013). Recent solo exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Rencontres D’Arles (2016); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017). Muholi's photographs are represented in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Walther Collection New York/Neu-Ulm; Tate Modern, London; and others. Muholi is represented by Stevenson Cape Town/ Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.