Zanele Muholi’s major retrospective – cut short by covid when it first went up in 2020 – returns to Tate Modern this week, coinciding with the first week of Pride Month. The slightly expanded exhibition includes works from across more than two decades of the artist’s photography, moving between the soft gaze on queer bodies and experiences in tender documentary image, realized in close collaboration with participants, to searing self-portraits that skewer dominant ideologies and ways of looking at queer Black bodies. New sculptures have also been added, on view to the public for the first time, including a representation of the female sexual anatomy in bronze.

Muholi’s work can be seen in relation to South African history and the social and political changes that occurred in the 1990s. While South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation – the first constitution in the world to do so in 1996 – the reality for many LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa was starkly different, and violence and prejudice remain rife. Many of Muholi’s long-term, ongoing photo-based projects stem from the need to commemorate, memorialize and pay witness to their community and their experiences, trauma and joy.

This dramatic self-portrait belongs to a more recent series, entitled Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ in isiZulu) in which Muholi turns the camera on themself, performing different characters, using everyday items from their surroundings to create sculptural costumes. The images each respond to experiences the artist has had in the place the portrait was made – encounters with racism, eurocentrism, and homophobia. The contrast in the images is enhanced in post production to emphasize the darkness of their skin tone, to reclaim their Blackness, a statement of pride. Muholi’s exhibition runs to January 26, 2025.

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