Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness features over ninety of Muholis evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholis immediate environment. These portraits reflect the journey, self-image, and possibilities of a black woman in todays global society. With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholis images, this title is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.
These feel like images you might have dreamed, both of the kind that slip away and the ones you manage to keep tenuously in your grasp, slippery, otherworldly. . . . Before our eyes, Zanele Muholi transforms into a mother, a domestic worker, an Afrofuturist, an oracle. Its fiction and it is not.Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is the long-awaited monograph from one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. The book features over ninety of Muholis evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholis immediate environment. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholis radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms. As Muholi states, I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spacesbrave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselvesto encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.
With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholis images, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.
