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Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Revealing Portraits: Neelika Jayawardane Discusses Zanele Muholi's 'Visual Activism'

Aug 22, 2017
6:30–8 pm

New York, NY, USA
ICI Curatorial Hub

401 Broadway, Suite 1620
New York, NY 10013

Neelika Jayawardane, art critic and scholar, will discuss the earlier works (2005-2006) of artist Zanele Muholi and the activist impulses within this body of photographic work.

South African Zanele Muholi is now a globally recognized photographer and ‘visual activist’. In her latest project, a series of self-portraits, titled Somnyama Ngonyama – meaning ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ in Muholi’s first language, isiZulu – she theatrically stages stereotyped versions of blackness in which she, and black women in general, have been positioned historically, as well as in the present. These self-portraits are a departure from Faces and Phases, the portrait series she began creating in 2006, for which she came to be known as a talented photographer and a fearless activist. In that ongoing project, she commemorates and celebrates the lives of the black gay, lesbian and transgender people she meets in her journeys throughout her home country, visiting participants again and again to meticulously document their lives. This documentation – revealing the ubiquity and ordinariness of queerness, from urbane centers to the margins of South Africa’s townships – won her respect as a photographer, as well as the ire of conservative politicians in the country.

In the early years of South Africa’s democracy, euphoria of freedom may have convinced many that South Africa’s progressive constitution – which specified protection for LGBTI people – indicated a fully inclusive liberation. Yet, Muholi’s compulsion to create an archive of “visual, oral and textual materials that include black lesbians and the role they have played in our communities” evolved as a reaction to the opposition, exclusion, and erasure that she, and other LGBTI people faced from the nation. Her project aimed to counter invisibility, marginality and systemic silence; she sought, instead, to include LGBTI people to the forefront of South Africa’s liberation narrative. But violent reactions from politicians at her exhibitions, and subsequent theft of her hard-drives containing the records of her photographs highlighted the lengths to which the nation would go to force patriarchal compliance and heteronormativity. The reactions to Muholi and her work, during her early years of exhibiting her work in South Africa, bear witness to the schizophrenic experience of living in a nation which touted freedom for all, but where LGBTI people continued to be targets of brutal repression.

This program is organized by Moses Serubiri.


This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@curatorsintl.org with ZANELE in the subject line.

 

Presenters
Serubiri Moses

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author who lives in New York.

M. Neelika Jayawardane

M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg (South Africa).


Credits 

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.