Zanele Muholi
Hail the Dark Lioness

Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness)

Published by delpire & co.

26.5 cm x 35.5 cm, 212 pages, 96 illustrations printed in 3 tones

Hardcover, French

 

“Photography saved my life. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.” – Zanele Muholi

This eagerly awaited book is the first French-language monograph by Zanele Muholi, South African artist and activist. Long-time activist against homophobia and racial hatred, Zanele Muholi presents in this beautiful bound book 96 superbly reproduced self-portraits that question the representation of the black body, injustice, and the place of black women in society. today.

Accompanying these works, an interview of the artist with Renée Massai, chief curator at the Autograph ABP museum in London – an art centre dedicated to the exploration of identity through photography and film, and twenty- four unpublished texts by poets, authors and exhibition curators placed opposite the images, enlighten the reading.
Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail to you, Black Lioness resonates like an incantation, a courageous, dazzling speech, both intimate and collective.

Born in 1972, Zanele Muholi defines herself above all as a “visual activist”, and has been involved since the early 2000s in a post-apartheid South Africa, alongside black lesbian, gay, bi, transqueer and intersex. While the country’s constitution has prohibited since 1996 any discrimination based on sexual orientation, these communities remain the target of extreme violence in the country. In 2009, she founded “Inkanyis”, a visual activism association serving the LGBTI community, whose motto is “Produce – Educate – Diffuse”. In 2016, she participated in the Rencontres d’Arles and in the exhibition The Other Continent, Artists, Women, Africans at the Muséum du Havre. After the first exhibition in Paris in 2012, she is one of the major figures of the Art / Africa exhibition in 2017 at the Louis-Vuitton Foundation. LGBTI activist before becoming an artist, Zanele Muholi brings to light in her photography the voices of those who have been silent for too long.