Object of the Month: "Sine IV, Melbourne, Australia," 2020 by Zanele Muholi

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art has recently acquired the photograph Sine IV, Melbourne, Australia, by South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi. The photograph is part of the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama (isiZulu for “Hail the Dark Lioness”), which the artist began in 2012. The series comprises self-portraits in which Muholi enacts arresting poses and facial expressions that range from defiant to mournful. The titles include Zulu names, which are the artist’s alter egos crafted both when Muholi is at home in Johannesburg and while traveling. The series explores, in the artist’s own words, “what it means to be black, 365 days a year.”

In several of the photographs throughout this series, Muholi dons everyday objects and materials as though they are ceremonial regalia. For instance, in Sine IV, a decorated white bowl or vase becomes a sort of crown while the artist assumes a downcast gaze looking over their left shoulder. In other self-portraits, towels, sheets, gourds, and even a glass lampshade are transformed into various kinds of headdress while materials like Styrofoam, rubber tires, and miners’ hats and goggles become their own forms of bodily ornament that reference moments of violence and discrimination in the artist’s life, apartheid, and labor strikes violently suppressed by police. Through these photographs, Muholi not only creates alter egos but also new archetypes by combining Western pictorial conventions with references to South African politics. Significantly, Muholi manipulates the tone of the photographs to make their own complexion appear darker, calling attention to the long history of marginalization and exclusion of Black women in Euro-Americentric canons of art.

Muholi’s art and activism both center on issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex people primarily in South Africa but also globally. Their various series of photographs have focused on social justice and visibility for Black queer and trans individuals and communities who strive to live as their authentic selves while confronting homophobia, hate crimes, HIV/AIDS, and state-sponsored violence and discrimination. Despite their tireless artistic output, Muholi prefers to be known as an activist and is the co-founder of the Forum of Empowerment of Women and the founder of Inkanyiso, a platform for queer and visual activism.

Zanele Muholi’s Sine IV, Melbourne, Australia will resonate with many classes being taught at Bowdoin. In addition to courses on modern and contemporary art history, the photograph will also contribute to classroom discussions on empathy, dissidence, queerness and international relations, pictorial constructions of gender, as well as African art, culture, and politics. The acquisition of this photograph will not only add a work by one of the highest-acclaimed photographers and visual artists working today but will also advance the Museum of Art’s goal of diversifying its holdings, which to date includes a relatively modest number of works by contemporary African artists. The acquisition of a photograph by Zanele Muholi will also enhance the Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary photography, which has been growing in recent decades.

Muholi’s work has been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibitions with subjects ranging from contemporary African photography to queer representation, conflict, intimacy, and portraiture. They have work in many public and campus art collections in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Harvard Art Museums; and the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition of seventy photographs, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, was organized by Autograph London and traveled to the Colby College Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Museo de Arte moderno de Buenos Aires, among several other institutions and galleries. The series was also exhibited in the form of LED billboards in New York Times Square. A major survey of 260 photographs from across the decades of Muholi’s career is planned at Tate Modern in June 2024.

Muholi received an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University in Toronto. As with their exhibitions and collections, Muholi’s accolades are too many to enumerate fully and include an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, a Lucie Humanitarian Award, a Rees Visionary Award, and an Mbokodo Award for South African Women in the Arts, in addition to being shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015. They are an honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain since 2018 and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2016.

Immediate plans for displaying Sine IV include the exhibition Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now, which will open in January 2025.

Sean Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Bowdoin College Museum of Art