A self-described visual activist, Zanele Muholi uses the camera to explore issues of gender identity, representation, and race. Often photographing their own body or members of their LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, Muholi calls attention to the trauma and violence enacted on queer people while celebrating their beauty and resilience.
Activism is central to Muholi’s artistic practice, from their early work contending with the dangers of being queer in South Africa to their more recent work embracing their own blackness and gender expression. This exhibition brings together photographs from 2002 to the present alongside the artist’s latest explorations in painting and sculpture. The first major exhibition of Muholi’s work on the West Coast, it provides the opportunity for Bay Area audiences to experience the full range of the artist’s expansive project.
On view at SFMOMA from January 18–August 11, 2024, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me brings together over 100 of the artist’s photographs from 2002 to the present, alongside paintings, sculpture, and video. The exhibition provides an opportunity for audiences to experience Muholi’s expansive artistic project to celebrate and make visible their Black queer community in post-apartheid South Africa.
Read our feature interview with the artist last year.
