Zanele Muholi

So they have 'eyes to see'

"I must be willing to tell what I've seen.
I must bear witness.
I must transgress."

-bell hooks, Art on My Mind visual politics (1995)

"Without a visual identity we have no community, no support network, no movement. Making ourselves visible is a continual process."

-Joan E Brien (1983)

The current exhibition references the photographic works captured between 2006 and 2008, and it is part of an ongoing series marking the visual history of black lesbian lives in South Africa. The aim is to ensure that our faces and voices are included in the canon of women and within the archives of this country. The photography presented combines three distinct bodies of work: Faces and Phases, Being Series and Massa and Mina(h).

In Faces and Phases, I continue to document and explore black lesbian identities through portraiture, where the participants are photographed in their various domiciles. One of our collective painful experiences as a community is the loss of friends and acquaintances through disease or hate crimes. Some of these participated in my visual projects. What is left behind now is the individuals' portraits that works as a site of memory for us, as a trace of 'who and what existed' in a particular space at this particular moment when our black lesbian and South African histories intersect.

In the Being Series (2007) I interrogate black lesbian relationships and safer sex. On the surface, the visuals capture couples in intimate positions and moments showing their love for each other. However, deeper within these I wish to highlight how HIV/AIDS prevention programming has failed women who have sex with other women.

In my latest project "Massa" and Mina(h)( 2008), I turn my own black body into a subject of art. I allow various photographers to capture my image as directed by me. I use performativity to deal with the still racialized issues of female domesticity-black women doing house work for white families. The project is based on the life and story of my mother. I draw on my own memories, and pay tribute to her domesticated role as a (domestic)worker for the same family for 42 years. The series is also meant to acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity, while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their place of work. There continues to be little recognition and little protection from the state for the hard labour these women perform to feed and clothe and house their families.