“Brave Beauties” series - Eva Mofokeng I, Parktown, Johannesburg
2014 - Photography (Photography)
76,5 x 51 cm
Zanele Muholi
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:
Related works featuring themes of: » Black-and-White Photography, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Contemporary Realist Portraiture, » Cultural Commentary, » South African
© » KADIST
Pascal Shirley
2006Gypsy 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...
© » KADIST
Pascal Shirley
2006Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014South 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....
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2007This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
© » KADIST
Qing Zhang
2006603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2009Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » APERTURE
An-My LE
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
© » KADIST
Agnieszka Kurant
2022For 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...
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2013Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2005Produced 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...
© » KADIST
Elad Lassry
2013In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...