![]() ![]() This offers sharp commentary on the way that beauty and status are so often associated in the mass media and among black people with lighter skin. The images flirt dangerously with racist iconography. Muholi addresses this technical challenge by pushing the medium to its limits. Photography is not kind to very dark skin: either you disappear against a dark background or lose your features against a light one. In all, the skintone is darkened, not with make-up – as minstrel performers might have used blackface – but digitally, in post-production, by upping the contrasts to the maximum. Some of the images are regal, others achingly vulnerable. MAIN IMAGE “Ntozakhe II”, Parktown, 2016 “Phila I”, Parktown, 2016 Are those eyes fearsome or fearful? If this is a lioness, she often needs to lick her wounds. But in many of the portraits, the character seems almost suffocated by such adornments. ![]() In another portrait, after an incident of racial profiling at airport security, Muholi is adorned in jewellery made of plastic cable-ties which are normally used to restrain people. In one sequence the artist celebrates her life by fashioning regal crowns out of the articles of workaday servitude: scouring pads and clothes pegs. Muholi’s mother, Bester, was a domestic worker in apartheid South Africa who had to leave her own children to care for a white family. Others were made on the road, a travelogue of the nomadic artist in hotel rooms across the world. Some were taken in Muholi’s sparse flat in Johannesburg. The “Dark Lioness” portraits are alter egos, and many have Zulu names. Now, with an acute sense of the way identity politics is expressed in both art and politics, Muholi has turned the camera inwards, in an examination of “what it means to be black, 365 days a year”. These continue to be updated, and were recently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The global art world first took note of Muholi when a series of portraits of lesbians from the artist’s own community were exhibited in 2012 at Documenta, the quinquennial German show that has launched many artists. From a black, working-class family, Muholi is South Africa’s biggest international art star after William Kentridge and David Goldblatt, two white men a generation older. They sold out in the previews at Muholi’s New York gallery and are about to be published as a book by Aperture. Last autumn they stared out of digital billboards over Times Square in New York as part of the city’s Performa Biennial festival. Called “Somnyama Ngonyama” (“Hail the Dark Lioness”), the series has been shown in ten cities across the world in the past year. Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits are so dark they glow. ![]()
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