Zanele Muholi — Seeing and Being Seen
Zanele Muholi — Seeing and Being Seen
Zanele Muholi calls themself a visual activist, not an artist — a distinction that carries real weight. Their work, spanning photography, video, and installation, is fundamentally about presence: who gets to be seen, how visibility is constructed, what it means to insist on your own image in a world that would rather look away.
The series Somnyama Ngonyama — Hail the Dark Lioness — is a self-portrait project in which Muholi appears in over 90 images, each one transforming their body and gaze through props, costume, and framing. The images are not comfortable. They demand to be reckoned with. They assert a beauty that the mainstream has systematically excluded, and they do so with a formal rigour that makes each image technically as well as politically powerful.
The Léger connection is specific and real. The Léger Guide is built around a woman whose identity — Caribbean, European, Portuguese by adoption, internationally mobile — sits outside the established structures of wine media. Muholi's work is about exactly this: the person who exists in the gaps between categories, who refuses to be made invisible by the systems that can't accommodate them.
The conversation: about identity as a visual language. About what it means to make beauty from a body that the mainstream has deemed outside beauty's frame. About how a wine publication with a singular voice disrupts a media landscape that has always assumed its audience was someone else.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
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The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
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The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024