bronze

Artwork date: 2021
Signature details: signed, dated and numbered 2/3 behind the right arm
Exhibited: Art Paris, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, Galerie Carole Kvasnevski, 7 to 10 April 2022. Another example from the edition exhibited.

(1)

90 x 60 x 35 cm

Provenance:

Muholi Art Institute, Cape Town.

Notes:

Sir Zanele Muholi is the Black Madonna of the global art world. The gender slippage in this sentence is deliberate – Muholi operates in an extramoral Nietzschean realm, beyond boundaries. The radical currency of Muholi's art must be understood as such.

The sculpture, Muholi II (2021), which sees the artist extending the versatility of their practice is quaint, retro, quirky – fundamentally queer. As gender theorist Judith Butler points out in her essay, Radically Queer; “If the term queer is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only re-deployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding purposes”.[1] This is why Muholi declares that “The political agenda behind my work is not yet fulfilled... I have to continue to redirect, resist, and interrogate the act of looking”.[2] Like Butler, Muholi occupies an expanded field, in which looking is as tyrannical as it is enlightening. Optics matter.

With regard to the sculpture, Muholi II, the optic is decidedly quaint and obtuse, current and old-fashioned. Muholi's point? That to be queer – in the healthiest, incorporative and intelligent sense of the word – is to be untimely, outside causation, radically vertical, otherwise.

This is the point of all of Muholi's art. After the Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, Muholi plays in the dark, and, as such, produces art that is both palpable and illuminating. This is because Muholi knows that their 'political agenda' is permanent, unfulfilled, latent, and that art, to truly reach the world, must, despite all, remain sonar. Queer, definitionally, is this powerful abstraction. We see a 'man', a 'woman' – a slippage between – a being composed, entire, yet profoundly hesitant. Why? Because Muholi must perpetually “redirect, resist, and interrogate the act of looking”.[3]

Ashraf Jamal

[1] Judith Butler, 'Critically Queer' in Goodman, L & De Gay, J. (eds). (2000). Politics and Performance, London and New York: Rutledge.

[2] Zanele Muholi in Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance Gallery Guide. Available at: https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/being-muholi/gallery-guide (Accessed: 31 October 2022).

[3] ibid

Collections:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, Baltimore; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York.; Tate Modern, London and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town.