Description
The highly anticipated second volume to the widely acclaimed and celebrated self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol. II, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of personhood, queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Since the publication of the first volume in 2018, Muholi has continued to photograph themself in a range of new international locations. Drawing on material props found in each environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black individual in today's global society, and-most important-speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Renee Mussai, curator and historian, brings together written contributions from more than ten curators, poets, and authors, building a poetic and experimental framework that extends the idea of speculative futures and the potentiality of multivalent selves. Powerfully arresting, this collection further amplifies Muholi's expressive and radical manifesto. As they state in the first volume, "My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance-existence as well as insistence."
Exhibition Schedule:Opportunity to pitch an exclusive with art section in New York Times, New Yorker "Photo Booth" or Guardian Features aimed at CultureType, Zora, Essence dedicated to Black perspectives Invite artist for Aperture PhotoBook Club program Explore serial opportunities for text by Tina Campt Partner with Yancey Richardson gallery on launch to promote within art audiences
About the Author
Zanele Muholi (born in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa, 1972) is a visual activist and photographer, cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. Muholi has won numerous awards, including France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017; ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; and a Prince Claus Award (2013). Their Faces and Phases series was shown at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 55th Venice Biennale, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize in 2015. The first volume of Somnyama Ngonyama (Aperture, 2018) was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 2019. Muholi is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. They are represented by Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. Renee Mussai is artistic director and chief curator at the Walther Collection, after more than twenty years as senior curator and head of collection at Autograph, London. A curator, writer, and scholar of photography and lens-based media with a special interest in African and diasporic lens-based Black feminist and queer visual arts practices, Mussai has organized internationally traveling exhibitions such as Zanele Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness and the critically acclaimed Black Chronicles programs. Her publications include Lina Iris Viktor's award-winning monograph Some Are Born to Endless Night-Dark Matter (2020) and the forthcoming Eyes That Commit: Black Women and Non-Binary Photographers-A Visual Survey (2023). Mussai is currently research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; associate lecturer at University of the Arts London; and former guest curator and fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Harper's magazine and is anthologized in Sad Sack: Collected Writing by Sophia Al-Maria (2019). Al-Maria's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, New York; 2013 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Waqif Art Centre, Doha, Qatar; and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, among other venues. Phoebe Boswell is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She has had solo exhibitions at Autograph, London; Goeteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg; and New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK. Her works are held in public and private collections, including the UK Government Art Collection and the Studio Museum, New York. Tina Campt leads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the founding convenor of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She is the author of more than five books, including A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2022) and Listening to Images (2017), and coeditor of Imagining Everyday Life: Enactments in Vernacular Photography (2020). She currently holds a joint appointment at Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology and at the university's Lewis Center for the Arts as the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the humanities. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer, independent scholar, poet, activist, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of several books, including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2022) and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2017), and is coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (2016). In 2020, Gumbs was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her forthcoming book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: A Cosmic Biography. Aluta Humbane is a composer, producer, musician, photographer, LGBTIQ+ activist, and playwright. Humbane is a resident vocalist at the Playhouse Company in Durban, South Africa, and is the director of Injongo Performing Arts in Durban. Ntsiki Jacobs is a researcher, freelance writer, and editor at the Muholi Art Institute. Jacobs is also a business development consultant, working with the National Department of Transport in South Africa. Porsha Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator. An Individual World Poetry Slam champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization, Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston, and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too (2019). Lola Olufemi is a Black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation researcher based at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster, UK. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands, and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), and is a member of 'bare minimum,' an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. Legacy Russell is a curator and writer, and the executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, New York. Formerly she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell is the author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), and her writing has been recognized by the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship, and a 2021 Creative Capital Award. Duncan Whyte is an independent graphic designer from London, living and working in France. His most recent work includes the first volume of Somnyama Ngonyama (Aperture, 2018) and Flint Is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier (2022) and Baldwin Lee (2022), both of which were shortlisted for Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook of the Year.
Reviews
Zanele Muholi's portraits are images that change the temperature of a room. ... They inhabit tropes of classical beauty, futuristic foreboding, primeval fierceness, and indeterminately regal stature through cranial embllishments that magnify the figure centered in each image. It is a figure who morphs from persona to persona in each portrait, reconfiguring the aesthetic frame to recenter Blackness as a new standard of beauty. -Tina M. Campt -- Tina M. Campt
Book Information
ISBN 9781597115377
Author Zanele Muholi
Format Hardback
Page Count 172
Imprint Aperture
Publisher Aperture
Weight(grams) 1542g
Dimensions(mm) 355mm * 265mm * 25mm
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol. II, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of personhood, queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Since the publication of the first volume in 2018, Muholi has continued to photograph themself in a range of new international locations. Drawing on material props found in each environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black individual in today's global society, and-most important-speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Renee Mussai, curator and historian, brings together written contributions from more than ten curators, poets, and authors, building a poetic and experimental framework that extends the idea of speculative futures and the potentiality of multivalent selves. Powerfully arresting, this collection further amplifies Muholi's expressive and radical manifesto. As they state in the first volume, "My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance-existence as well as insistence."
Exhibition Schedule:
- MEP, Paris, February 1, 2023-May 21, 2023
- Mudec Museo delle Culture, Milan, March 30-July 30, 2023
- Haus der Kunst, Munich, April 14-July 23, 2023
- Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland, October 22, 2023-February 11, 2024
- SFMOMA, San Francisco, December 16, 2023-June 2, 2024
- Tate, London, Opens June 2024
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London, May 4, 2024-January 5, 2025
About the Author
Zanele Muholi (born in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa, 1972) is a visual activist and photographer, cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and founder of Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual media. Muholi has won numerous awards, including France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017; ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; and a Prince Claus Award (2013). Their Faces and Phases series was shown at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 55th Venice Biennale, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize in 2015. The first volume of Somnyama Ngonyama (Aperture, 2018) was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 2019. Muholi is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. They are represented by Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. Renee Mussai is artistic director and chief curator at the Walther Collection, after more than twenty years as senior curator and head of collection at Autograph, London. A curator, writer, and scholar of photography and lens-based media with a special interest in African and diasporic lens-based Black feminist and queer visual arts practices, Mussai has organized internationally traveling exhibitions such as Zanele Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness and the critically acclaimed Black Chronicles programs. Her publications include Lina Iris Viktor's award-winning monograph Some Are Born to Endless Night-Dark Matter (2020) and the forthcoming Eyes That Commit: Black Women and Non-Binary Photographers-A Visual Survey (2023). Mussai is currently research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; associate lecturer at University of the Arts London; and former guest curator and fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Harper's magazine and is anthologized in Sad Sack: Collected Writing by Sophia Al-Maria (2019). Al-Maria's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, New York; 2013 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Waqif Art Centre, Doha, Qatar; and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, among other venues. Phoebe Boswell is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She has had solo exhibitions at Autograph, London; Goeteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg; and New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK. Her works are held in public and private collections, including the UK Government Art Collection and the Studio Museum, New York. Tina Campt leads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the founding convenor of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She is the author of more than five books, including A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2022) and Listening to Images (2017), and coeditor of Imagining Everyday Life: Enactments in Vernacular Photography (2020). She currently holds a joint appointment at Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology and at the university's Lewis Center for the Arts as the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the humanities. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer, independent scholar, poet, activist, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of several books, including Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2022) and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2017), and is coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (2016). In 2020, Gumbs was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her forthcoming book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: A Cosmic Biography. Aluta Humbane is a composer, producer, musician, photographer, LGBTIQ+ activist, and playwright. Humbane is a resident vocalist at the Playhouse Company in Durban, South Africa, and is the director of Injongo Performing Arts in Durban. Ntsiki Jacobs is a researcher, freelance writer, and editor at the Muholi Art Institute. Jacobs is also a business development consultant, working with the National Department of Transport in South Africa. Porsha Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator. An Individual World Poetry Slam champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization, Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston, and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too (2019). Lola Olufemi is a Black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation researcher based at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster, UK. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands, and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), and is a member of 'bare minimum,' an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. Legacy Russell is a curator and writer, and the executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, New York. Formerly she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell is the author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), and her writing has been recognized by the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship, and a 2021 Creative Capital Award. Duncan Whyte is an independent graphic designer from London, living and working in France. His most recent work includes the first volume of Somnyama Ngonyama (Aperture, 2018) and Flint Is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier (2022) and Baldwin Lee (2022), both of which were shortlisted for Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook of the Year.
Reviews
Zanele Muholi's portraits are images that change the temperature of a room. ... They inhabit tropes of classical beauty, futuristic foreboding, primeval fierceness, and indeterminately regal stature through cranial embllishments that magnify the figure centered in each image. It is a figure who morphs from persona to persona in each portrait, reconfiguring the aesthetic frame to recenter Blackness as a new standard of beauty. -Tina M. Campt -- Tina M. Campt
Book Information
ISBN 9781597115377
Author Zanele Muholi
Format Hardback
Page Count 172
Imprint Aperture
Publisher Aperture
Weight(grams) 1542g
Dimensions(mm) 355mm * 265mm * 25mm
