ART HISTORY LECTURE SERIES: ZANELE MUHOLI

Lectures on Art in the Black Diaspora: Locating the 'Universal' in the 'Specific'?

Zanele Muholi presents "so they have 'eyes to see'"

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Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban, in 1972 and lives in Johannesburg. She completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown and held her first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. Muholi’s work represents the black female body in a frank yet intimate way that challenges the history of the portrayal of black women’s bodies in documentary photography. She has worked as a community relations officer for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a black lesbian organization based in Gauteng, and as a photographer and reporter for Behind the Mask, an online magazine on lesbian and gay issues in Africa. Her solo exhibition “Only half the picture”, which showed at Michael Stevenson in March 2006, has travelled to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. She was the recipient of the 2005 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, and the first BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship in 2006. Recent group exhibitions include za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica at Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008); Make Art/Stop AIDS at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2008); and Heterotopias: the first Thessaloniki Biennale (2007).