Review: Zanele Muholi at The Tate Modern

Work by Zanele Muholi, on display at the Tate Modern

By Erin Deborah Waks

I have, I must say, a strange affinity for photography. While I love wandering the halls and galleries of most art exhibitions, for me the best ones are often when the art form explored is, indeed, the photographic one. 

So, armed with my Tate membership card in one hand and an overpriced latte in the other, I took myself on a little solo date to the new Zanele Muholi photography exhibition at the Tate Modern on the Southbank. A South African visual artist, I was interested to see if their work would chart a side of the country in which I was born with an entirely separate lens from that through which I have experienced it.

Short answer - it did. Muholi’s work has documented and heralded the lives of the country’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities from the 2000s onwards, and I found their work provocative and simultaneously intensely beautiful and striking. It has a unique insight into a community that is often marginalised, as the community in South Africa remains to this day a target for much violence and prejudice. 

The exhibition is divided into sections and each, for me, elucidated a vastly different and yet equally strong response. In Only Half The Picture, the intimate portrayal of love is deeply vulnerable, with close-up shots of bodies and bound chests. I found myself reflecting on how these images felt intrusive, while also alluring and intriguing - and sometimes disturbing. Similarly, I loved Brave Beauties and Being, both series which celebrate empowered individuals and tender, loving couples.

In Faces And Phases, subjects stare directly into the camera, forcing you, the viewer, to stare back. It should feel uncomfortable, I pondered. But the display, which is on a large scale, combines accompanying testimonies with these photographs to create a visual and written archive of the real lives of those who are living authentically despite ongoing oppression and discrimination. I found it immensely courageous.  

The most striking, for me, was the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama – translated as ‘Hail the Dark Lioness’, where Muholi themself becomes the subject of the images, not just the photographer. Playing with black and white images, the colour and layers of the photographic subject are nonetheless bright and grab your attention - a hugely important and impressive feat given the objective of giving voice, and face, to a marginalised community.