Notes

Although best known as a photographer, since 2020 Zanele Muholi has also produced work in other media, notably bronze sculpture and canvas paintings. Muholi began actively painting during the stay-at-home Covid lockdowns of 2020. Initially Muholi used acrylic, but quickly expanded their materials to include oil, ink, menstrual blood and other media. Muholi’s legion of social-media followers was the first to see these fantastical self-portraits. Stylistically related to Muholi’s inventive self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ in isiZulu), the earliest paintings included a zestful self-portrait of the artist wearing a Covid-mandated facemask. Risk and danger also inform this lot, literally in the repeated statement ‘fragile’. Colour is an important value in Muholi’s paintings and posed its own set of challenges to Muholi, who prefers to photograph in black and white. Of the role of colour in their paintings, Muholi has said that it was both therapeutic and a creative challenge: ‘Exploring with colour has a lot to do with healing, and in that way I’m taken out of my comfort zone.’¹

In 2021 Muholi debuted their paintings at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. A press statement described the paintings as ‘both a practical response and a contemplative exercise’ to the Covid pandemic: ‘As in Somnyama Ngonyama, in Muholi’s
paintings the artist is both participant and image maker. Muholi uses their paintings as an expansion of their photography. Costumery and vibrant colour are tools to consider the multiplicity of gender and representation and mythologise personal and
historical narratives.’² Shown alongside various Somnyama Ngonyama photographs, Muholi spoke of the shared aspiration of their new paintings and acclaimed photo self-portraits. ‘I’m very conscious of the process of making and hope that this connects to the politics of seeing and the politics of acting through seeing. These works ask me what it means to be present. I want people to see themselves differently through them too.’³

^1. Press release for Nize nani, Stevenson, Cape Town: https:// www.stevenson.info/exhibition/6348

^2. Press release for Awe Maaah!, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York: https://www.yanceyrichardson.com/exhibitions/zanelemuholi3

^3. Ibid.

Exhibited

Yancey Richardson, New York, Awe Maaah!, 10 September to 23 October 2021.