Black LGBTQIA+ lives matter, shout Muholi’s photographs

Photo: Zanele Muholi Qiniso, The Sails, Durban 2019 © Zanele Muholi Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson, New York

Daniel Nelson

Black LGBTQIA+ lives matter, shout Zanele Muholi’s photographs.

What a fabulous exhibition. The South African faces – including the photographer’s own magnificently unflinching self-portraits – look you in the eye, haunt you, challenge you, inform you.

There’s love, empowerment, beauty, trauma, tenderness, commitment, injustice, solidarity, intimacy and fun in the 300 pictures of lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex people and communities. The sheer force, originality and variety of the people and photos is a reminder and a rebuttal of the prejudice, intolerance, violence and racism that has led to Muholi’s lifelong camera activism.

The exhibition reminds us that the ignorance that has led to depravity such as “corrective rape” still occurs today, even though, for example, South Africa was the first country to constitutionally ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and same-sex couples have a legal right to marriage and adoption.

Tate Modern has given generous space to Muholi’s work, revising and expanding the original 2020 staging of the exhibition, which was cut short by Covid and lockdown. The long galleries and high ceilings offer a grand stage for the giant blown-up beach and beauty pageant photos (“Brave Beauties”) and overall provide a celebratory sense of a large, living community rather than of a ghettoised, disadvantaged minority that underlines Muholi’s mission of “resisting erasure” of the Black LGBTQIA+ community”.

Muholi’s work is also a head-on challenge to the “norms of photography of Black people” - which, as in the self-portraits (“Hail the Dark Lioness”), may entail deepening the blackness of the skin. The Evening Standard review described it as “delightful and devastating … one of the greatest exercises in self-portraiture of this, or any, age.”

+ Zanele Muholi, Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG, £18, until 26 January. Info: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/zanele-muholi

Related events:

6 June: Zanele Muholi in Conversation with Topher Campbell, 6.30-7.30pm, £20

23 September 2024 - 26 January 2025: Topher Campbell, My rukus! Heart, £20, installation and discussions

27 September: artist-led workshops, talks, music, film and more to celebrate Muholi at Tate Modern, 6-10pm