Silver gelatin print
Edition of 5 + 2AP
MO(U)RNING, a solo exhibition by visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi.
For Muholi, MO(U)RNING evokes death but also suggests the cycle of life as morning follows night. Life and death, love and hate are some of the antitheses that appear throughout her work.
In April this year, Muholi’s Cape Town apartment was burgled in what was apparently an attack directed at her visual activism. The lost material was an extensive archive of photographic work, videos and texts documenting hate crimes in South Africa and gender issues in Africa. Among this material was the Queercide project, created by Muholi to denounce and record hate crimes and atrocities committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people.
The loss of this material raised many questions for Muholi. What happen when such images disappear or when a collection of testimonies is erased?
In MO(U)RNING, Muholi presents elements of her documentation that were not lost, together with new work realised in recent months. The exhibition will include new and recent photographs from her Faces and Phases series of portraits and her Being series. Her multiple award-winning documentary Difficult Love, currently on view at Documenta 13 together with Faces and Phases, will be screened for the first time at the gallery. Photographs of crime scenes and new video works will also form part of the exhibition.
Her work gives public life to a community, its joys, traumas, fights and daily existence. She uses the power of visual material, offered by photographs and film, to affirm existing realities and expose truths and the cruel aspects of 21st century South African society where loving can be dangerous.
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