“Brave Beauties” series - Dimpho Tsotetsi, Parktown

2014 - Photography (Photography)

76,5 x 51 cm

Zanele Muholi

year born: 1972
gender: female
nationality: South African
home town: Umlazi, Durban, South Africa

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community. The verticality and scale of the prints accentuate the resilience of the figures, confronting the viewers with their scrutinizing and empowered gaze. The photographs support and promote self-expression, pride and autonomy in the face of an oppressive social system to reshape and reclaim an authoritative black lesbian and transgender presence in the global landscape. Presenting the black and white photographs as first-person testimonies of homophobia, discrimination and violence of LBGTQI black women, the “Brave Beauties” series thus acts as a conscription to autonomy and a visual activation of equal recognition.


Zanele Muholi (b. Umlazi, Durban, 1972) currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. She co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded “Inkanyiso”, a forum for queer and visual activist media. With the intention of highlighting the hate crimes in South Africa, Muholi subverts the oppressive narrative of Black queer and trans through rewriting a visual history.


Colors:



Gypsy
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...

Oakland Girls
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...

El hombre que hizo todas las cosas prohibidas
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2014

Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...

That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama
© » KADIST

Mark Soo

2008

The two large-scale stereoscopic photographs in That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama depict a recreation of Elvis Presley’s recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee...

Placebo VIII
© » KADIST

Agnieszka Kurant

2018

Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film...

La Memoria Verde
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

2019

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...

Black Imitates White
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...

Bread and Roses
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...

From Useless Wonder 04
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2007

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...

Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...

Why fear the future?
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2005

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...

Un hombre que camina (A Man Walking)
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place...

I am the Greatest
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...

The Tower of Babel: The Carnaval
© » KADIST

Du Zhenjun

2010

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...

Fashion Designer Marc Jacobs Is Selling Off His Entire Art Collection, Including a $3 Million Ed Ruscha - via artnet news
© » LARRY'S LIST

Ed Ruscha

The fashion designer is selling off all the art inside his West Village townhouse at Sotheby’s New York to make way for a new collection....

Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper
© » KADIST

Miljohn Ruperto

2009

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...

Sentimentite (First death caused by self-driving car 84/100, from Chapter 9: Tech Futurism)
© » KADIST

Agnieszka Kurant

2022

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...

South Africa Righteous Space
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....

No World
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

2014

No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing...

Men (055, 065)
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2012

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...