ZANELE MUHOLI AT SOUTHERN GUILD

Zanele Muholi’s exhibition at Southern Cape Town, South Africa is a powerful, deeply personal exploration of identity, self-representation, and resistance. Featuring new additions to their acclaimed self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama alongside their latest bronze sculptures, the exhibition presents a striking evolution in Muholi’s artistic practice. Each work challenges viewers to interrogate social constructs surrounding race, gender, and sexuality while celebrating Black and LGBTQIA+ identities. Through stark, monochromatic portraits and commanding sculptural forms, Muholi asserts a presence that is both intimate and monumental, crafting a narrative that bridges personal experience with collective history.

Muholi’s foray into sculpture marks a bold new chapter in their work, engaging with themes of bodily autonomy, medical literacy, and queer visibility. Their large-scale bronze representations of reproductive organs serve as both personal testimony and political statement, confronting taboos within South African society and beyond. Juxtaposing these visceral forms with self-portraits in clerical robes, Muholi reclaims narratives of sanctity and self-worth, redefining the body as a site of both struggle and transcendence.