Zanele Muholi at Michael Stevenson Contemporary
by Linda Stupart
'If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you have a long way to go, baby.'
This quotation comes from the ultimate Feminist bible, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch of 1970. In Zanele Muholi's 'Only Half the Picture', the Period series, including images of women with bloody tampons in their mouths, re-issues this challenge to a new generation of apparently even more liberated, opportunitied and powerful women. This piece, with others, debates the very exclusionary nature of the normative woman as defined in many older Feminist texts (including Greer's) and contemporary writing and thinking. Woman, there, is defined not only in opposition to the normative patriarchy, but has her own singular normality - that of the white heterosexual. Though at first glance the images in the Period series might seem to lack originality, Muholi's black subject renders the work quite distinct from any precedents.
'Not much has changed for us', says a woman in Muholi's video piece featuring the voices of both her subjects and the viewers of her work. This woman is speaking of her lack of freedom, equality, safety and agency as a black lesbian, and this is a statement that lies at the heart of Muholi's deeply personal and intrinsically political body of photographs.
In works such as Aftermath and Hate Crime Survivor Muholi documents the tragic and shocking realities of so called 'corrective rape' in South African townships - a practice whereby lesbian woman are repeatedly raped in an attempt to turn them into 'real African women'. In denying these subjects their very subjectivity by the exclusion of any facial features, Muholi not only suggests that these women might continually fear recognition in their communities, but also that they remain ignored by the greater powers that be. This point is underscored by what is possibly the most telling and poignant work, Case Number, which shows an impersonal, carelessly written number for a case of 'rape and assault' on a piece of paper which has clearly been crumpled many times by the wringing of anguished hands.
Dada, another standout piece, shows a young woman wearing a pale strap-on dildo covered in a condom. The title refers not only to roles that Muholi's subjects either chose to take on, or positions of power they are denied through their 'lack' of a (white) penis. The work also references the early Modernist art movement that founded an art history around a selection of Western Masters, ignoring the visual and critical voices of both women and Africans. Like the beautifully delicate untitled photographs of a young woman with inflated condoms tied around her waist, the useless condom in Dada also bemoans the lack of education and interest in finding a means towards promoting safe sex between women.
Meticulously composed pieces such as ID Crisis and in-security suggest the perils and confusions of trans-gendered and lesbian identity as well as the relationship between gender and sexuality and private and public life. ID Crisis shows a slender young woman strapping down her breasts, while in-Security shows the curvaceous, barely constrained body of a female security guard who, according to Muholi's video piece, must maintain an illusion of heterosexuality while at work and can only realise her homosexual desire in the privacy of her own domestic sphere - the traditional domain of the trapped woman.
Other images of tenderness and intimacy, including works in the Beloved and Closer to my Heart series, indicate a normalcy of love between women and work towards finding a sameness in human emotion and intimate relations as opposed to encouraging a black lesbian separatism fuelled by Otherness.
At its essence, Moholi's show is an exposition of tenderness and empathy - photographs of 'her people' and documentation of her activist work in Johannesburg townships. Most of the works are shocking in a way that encourages the viewer to question exactly why they hold this very power, and are skillfully and sensitively shot, allowing both the sublime and the beautiful to seep into her subject mater.
A warning on the door to the gallery states that the exhibition 'May offend sensitive viewers'. Sensitive to exactly what I'm not sure - menstrual blood, naked black women, lesbians or an inanimate penis - but hopefully in time exhibitions such as these can nurture a South African public, sensitive or not, who won't be offended at all.
Opens: March 29
Closes: April 29
Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Fax: (021) 421 2578
Email: info@michaelstevenson.com
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
