Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness

Since 2012, Muholi has turned the camera on themself in Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail the Dark Lioness”), an ongoing series of self-portraits made almost entirely on the road, in the hotel rooms, guest houses and borrowed spaces of a life spent travelling for exhibitions and residencies. Each portrait is built from whatever is at hand: hotel bedding twisted into headwear, curtains, bedside lamps, cutlery, cleaning products, cable ties, clothes pegs, everyday and often domestic objects repurposed as costume and prop. Hairstyles, styling and staging are entirely self-directed; each image is shot using only available, natural light.

Twenty Years of Faces and Phases 

In 2006, the same year South Africa became the first country on the African continent to legalise same-sex marriage, Muholi began Faces and Phases. It started as a direct response to the erasure of Black lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming people from public and historical record: a way of insisting, portrait by portrait, that these lives had taken place. Twenty years on, the project has grown into an archive of hundreds of black-and-white portraits made across five continents, a living document rather than a closed body of work, added to every time Muholi travels.

Amsterdam and the Thami Mnyele Foundation

Muholi’s relationship with Amsterdam runs deeper than a single visit. Between July and September 2009, the same year they were also an artist in residence at MIT, Muholi lived and worked at the Thami Mnyele Foundation’s studio in Amsterdam Oud-West, on a three-month residency named after the South African artist and MEDU Art Ensemble member Thami Mnyele. Muholi returned to the Foundation for a second residency in December 2013.

Brave Beauties (2014 – ongoing)

Is a series of portraits of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people. Many of them are also beauty pageant contestants. Queer beauty pageants offer a space of resistance within the Black LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa. They are a place where individuals can realize and express their beauty outside heteronormative and white supremacist cultures. Muholi has commented that these participants ‘enter beauty pageants to change mind-sets in the communities they live in, the same communities where they are most likely to be harassed, or worse.’

At its centre, Hlanganani is an act of activism as much as an exhibition. Part of the gallery is given over to an educational presentation developed with the Muholi Art Institute (MAI), documentaries, MAI’s own publications, and archival material for visitors to spend time with. The exhibition opens outside the calendar of World Pride, deliberately: for Muholi, the visibility and history of the Black queer community is not a subject for one season, but, as they have put it, a 365-day commitment. The exhibition’s title, Hlanganani, means “unite” , a fitting frame for a project that has spent twenty years doing exactly that: gathering faces, cities and histories into a single, still-growing archive, with Amsterdam now written into it twice over.