Zanele Muholi was born on 19 July 1972 and is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation.
19 Facts About Zanele Muholi
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Zanele Muholi was shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize in 2015.
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Zanele Muholi has a restrospective exhibition on at Maison europeenne de la photographie in Paris from 1 February to 25 May 2023.
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Zanele Muholi was born and raised in Umlazi, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.
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Zanele Muholi's father died shortly after their birth, and their mother was a domestic worker who had to leave her children to work for a white family during Apartheid in South Africa.
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Zanele Muholi has described themselves as a visual activist as opposed to an artist.
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Zanele Muholi completed an Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg in 2003, and held their first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004.
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Zanele Muholi was employed as a photographer and reporter for Behind the Mask, an online magazine on LGBTI issues in Africa.
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Zanele Muholi first received global attention from the art world in 2012 at Documenta, a world-famous exhibition of modern and contemporary art in, for a series of portraits of lesbians and transgender participants titled: Faces and Phases.
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In 2006, Zanele Muholi began their Faces and Phases project, a series of around three hundred portraits of lesbians, shot in front of plain or patterned backgrounds.
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In June 2014, Zanele Muholi was back at their alma mater, showing Faces and Phases at the Ryerson Image Centre as part of WorldPride.
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Zanele Muholi calls this as just one of their many responsibilities, and these harsh and cruel realities cannot be ignored.
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In 2014 Zanele Muholi began working on 365 self portraits for the series Somnyama Ngonyama.
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In 2002, Zanele Muholi co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, a black lesbian organization dedicated to providing a safe space for women to meet and organize.
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In 2009, Zanele Muholi founded Inkanyiso, a non-profit organisation concerned with queer visual activism.
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In 2018, Zanele Muholi collaborated with photographer Lindeka Qampi, and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, to create and mentor a cohort of women artists in Philadelphia.
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In 2021, Zanele Muholi produced a colouring book of their exhibition Somnyama Ngonyama to engage South-African children who are categorised as youth until the age of 35, as a result of the apartheid.
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In 2010, Zanele Muholi co-directed their documentary Difficult Love, which was commissioned by SABC.
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In 2013, Zanele Muholi co-directed a documentary called We Live in Fear, released by Human Rights Watch.