In Person:
Zanele Muholi
September 20, 2026
"Visual activism means you are inside the struggle, you are of the community, and the camera is a tool to co-create, to affirm life, not just to record suffering. When I photograph my people, Black LGBTQIA+ bodies in South Africa, I'm saying: you exist, you are beautiful, you deserve to be seen in your fullness, your resistance, your love, your pleasure." Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi (they/them) is a South African visual activist and photographer. For more than two decades, Muholi has documented the lives of South Africa's Black queer people. Muholi themself views this project as a way to re-write a Black queer history of South Africa, "for the world to know about our resistance and our existence at the height of hates crimes in South Africa and beyond." In Difficult Love and Enraged by a Picture, Muholi's works are presented in two different ways: as documentary and as lecture-performance. Both works foreground photography as a form of lived experience, in which the maker of the images is inseparably connected to questions of identity, visibility, and survival within LGBTQIA+ communities in South Africa. Viewed together, both films articulate photography as document and discursive form, moving between the personal and collective, the fixed and the performative, and insisting on the political urgency of visibility. (Marit Lena Herrmann / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Zanele Muholi in conversation with Djamila Grandits
In collaboration with FOTO ARSENAL WIEN. The exhibition Zanele Muholi We Are Here will be on view at Foto Arsenal Wien from September 19, 2026, through January 10, 2027.
"Visual activism means you are inside the struggle, you are of the community, and the camera is a tool to co-create, to affirm life, not just to record suffering. When I photograph my people, Black LGBTQIA+ bodies in South Africa, I'm saying: you exist, you are beautiful, you deserve to be seen in your fullness, your resistance, your love, your pleasure." Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi (they/them) is a South African visual activist and photographer. For more than two decades, Muholi has documented the lives of South Africa's Black queer people. Muholi themself views this project as a way to re-write a Black queer history of South Africa, "for the world to know about our resistance and our existence at the height of hates crimes in South Africa and beyond." In Difficult Love and Enraged by a Picture, Muholi's works are presented in two different ways: as documentary and as lecture-performance. Both works foreground photography as a form of lived experience, in which the maker of the images is inseparably connected to questions of identity, visibility, and survival within LGBTQIA+ communities in South Africa. Viewed together, both films articulate photography as document and discursive form, moving between the personal and collective, the fixed and the performative, and insisting on the political urgency of visibility. (Marit Lena Herrmann / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Zanele Muholi in conversation with Djamila Grandits
In collaboration with FOTO ARSENAL WIEN. The exhibition Zanele Muholi We Are Here will be on view at Foto Arsenal Wien from September 19, 2026, through January 10, 2027.