Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness

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These feel like images you might have dreamed, both of the kind that slip away and the ones you manage to keep tenuously in your grasp, slippery, otherworldly. . . . Before our eyes, Zanele Muholi transforms into a mother, a domestic worker, an Afrofuturist, an oracle. Its fiction and it is not.Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is the long-awaited monograph from one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. The book features over ninety of Muholis evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholis immediate environment. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholis radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms. As Muholi states, I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spacesbrave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselvesto encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.

With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholis images, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.

Reviews

The first thing to note about Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness is that it begins before you open it. The striking cover portrait itselfNtozakhe II, Parktown, Johannesburg, from 2016demands ample time to be taken inThis is how the book starts on you, its front and back cover working together to prepare you for what lies within. A hint at its insides.Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Zanele Muholi (born in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa, 1972) is a visual activist and photographer, cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. Muholi has won numerous awards for their work, including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; a Prince Claus Award (2013); and both the Casa frica award for best female photographer and a Fondation Blachre award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). Their Faces and Phases series was shown at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 55th Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Brse Photography Prize in 2015. Muholi is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. They are represented by Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.