February 10th, 2016

In contrast to her life‐long project of documenting members of the black LGBTI community of South Africa, for this body of work Muholi turns the camera on herself. She presented black and white self‐portraits taken while travelling in South Africa, America and Europe, Somnyama Ngonyama(meaning ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’) confronts the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive, while commenting on specific events in South Africa’s political history, such as the Marikana massacre.

Zanele Muholi was in Toronto to receive Ryerson University’s 2016 Outstanding International Alumni Award as a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media in 2009.