UNTIL SUNDAY 4/9
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
The South African Zanele Muholi puts the body queer black at the center of the story from a country marked by the segregation of apartheid, but what, on the other hand, boasts of having the first constitution in the world that made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal. In his photographs he connects the visual with activism, representing black LGBTQIA+ people who go outside the canon., little or nothing represented until now, to return your positive image to us. They are classic portraits in the form—bust 3/4, in black and white and with figures placed in profile or from the front looking at the camera—but challenging in content by raising uncomfortable questions about race, history, policy, memory and aesthetics. She puts herself in front of the camera to experience what it feels like on that side., to prevent others from telling their story, one that goes beyond the heteronormative. The people he portrays have decided how, with what clothes and in what context the photo was taken and its penetrating gaze confronts the viewer without hesitation, forcing him to look, recognize and respect. Muholi wants his models not to be passive objects, but proactive subjects with voice and dignity who endure our proud gaze. Precisely, about what it means for a black person to look back, the artist reflects in the series Somnya Ngomya that opens the sample, where she herself looks at us defiantly dressed in everyday objects like stools, scouring pads, combs, feathers and beads made of safety pins or tweezers to ridicule the colonial and folklorizing gaze of the West. And in this sense, has increased the contrast of the images to darken his skin and accentuate his blackness.
In the following series he focuses on survivors of hate crimes committed in townshipssouth africans, residential areas created during apartheid to house people expelled from places classified as “whites only”. Or capture moments of intimacy between LGBTQIA+ couples to challenge the absurd idea that existence queer It is foreign to the African. Or photograph transgender women, gay men and gender non-conforming people in public spaces as symbolic as Constitutional Hill, seat of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Or non-binary black people participating in beauty pageants queer, a priori, frivolous and trivial, but that in their context are discovered as spaces of resistance where beauty can be affirmed outside of heteronomativism and white supremacy..
The last gallery of images that you can see at the IVAM belongs to Faces and Phases, a play on words for a living archive of images about open identities that change. Muholi has photographed the same people again after a period of time and serves us in photographs of their transition from one stage of sexuality or gender and identity expression to another.. Or day-to-day changes related to growth, education, work experience and marriage. We are facing an exhibition that uses rawness without artifice to represent the ugly and the everyday., but adds dignity in the representation of the voiceless, the black LGBTQIA+ community of a country traversed by very recent wounds. S.M.
