Exhibition Details

Southern Guild, Los Angeles is pleased to present 'ZANELE MUHOLI', an autobiographical panorama of the visual activist and artist as their creative practice evolves over time and across mediums. It is on view from May 18, 2024 until August 31, 2024.
Provocative and perceptive, in this presentation Muholi encourages their audience to question the world around them—wielding artwork that re-imagines self and re-envisions agency. What does it mean to exist in this time? How can individual and cultural trauma be recognized and transcended? In what ways can art serve as a catalyst for discussion of, education about, and advocacy for antiracism, gender expression, and reproductive health? In each portrait—literal or symbolic—they confront and celebrate their identification with Black and LGBTQIA communities in their native South Africa, empowering individuals from various geographies and generations to identify with and make space for presence, self-love, remembrance, and healing.
This exhibition features Muholi’s recent additions to their ongoing self-portrait series 'Somnyama Ngonyama' alongside their newest work in bronze sculpture. Their artworks are inextricable from the specificity of their person—each series imprinting and asserting their ancestral history, personal experience, and individual trauma. Titled “Hail the Dark Lioness” in English, the photographs that comprise this body of work are a visual exploration of the Zulu term 'Somnyama', meaning Black, and 'Ngonyama', which is both the word for lion and their mother’s family name. These portraits are produced all around the world, where Muholi captures their form in complete solitude. Wrapped in cloaks made from hotel bed sheets, adorned with crowns made from clothesline pins, decorated with lipstick made from toothpaste and Vaseline, these works serve as a simultaneous document and vision of self-embodiment—existing in and through the immediacy of the medium. In making themselves their subject, Muholi offers a parallax gaze, one that empowers, rather than objectifies, their chameleon physique. Honouring their mother tongue and matriarchal lineage, these portraits express a web of relations that frame Muholi as an individual, a child, a grandchild, a sibling, a lover, a mind, a body, and a creative—unrestrained and ever-evolving.
'ZANELE MUHOLI' will be accompanied by the release of an eponymous artist monograph published by Southern Guild, capturing the personal depth and communal impact of this body of work. This is the first publication that will document Muholi’s sculptural oeuvre, featured alongside new and recent photography from their Somnyama Ngonyama series—in addition to seminal works from the artist’s archive. The catalogue will include scholarly essays and interviews that offer insight into their practice, particularly exploring the shift from the lensing of others to the lensing of self. Muholi’s own voice is a consistent presence in the monograph, offering intimate biographical accounts that have informed their creative journey and activist perspective.