All that carries us: A Q&A with Zanele Muholi

A feature by Artthrob on the 26th of June 2023. This should take you 6 minutes to read.

Southern Guild
15.06 - 17.08.2023

Zanele Muholi’s eponymous exhibition with Southern Guild sees the artist exploring the politics of the body in photography and bronze. We caught up with them to discuss their new body of work and the conversations it hopes to introduce.

ArtThrob: So, maybe we should start with the title of the show.

Zanele Muholi: The title of the show is ZANELE MUHOLI. That’s my name. I’m introducing myself into a new space. I think it’s very important for one to assert themselves within those spaces that are new. Because you are never known by everybody. I might be in Cape Town. I might live in South Africa. But that doesn’t mean that everybody knows my name and the work that I do. I think that, with a new audience that belongs to Southern Guild, and the people who they work with, it’s just me humbling myself and saying, “Hello, here I am.”

In this show, you’re working with multiple different mediums and introducing new work to the Somnyama Ngonyama series, which you started working on back in 2012 – over ten years now. How does it feel to be continually adding to this legacy?

Right now, we are just filling up this project that is known, which is sculptural on its own. As you can see, there are sculptural objects in my work. I’m playing with organic materials and toxic materials. Here, with feathers. There, with dry leaves. Here, palm leaves. There, wood pegs. All of these are materials. Imagine if these pieces were turned into sculptures. Then, it becomes a concrete piece.

The pieces themselves, they have an afterlife. In Mmotshola Metsi (The Water Bearer), you have the breast pot over my head, which speaks to women’s struggles. It’s just an extension of what I’ve done before. The sculptures are made from 3D imagery and turned into something concrete. But all that surrounds us is visual. I think that it’s very important for people to look beyond what meets the eye. What they make with their eyes, it’s up to each and everyone of us who is capable. The meaning behind each and every object that is presented, in art spaces, or formal spaces. That is what I’m presenting here.

Installation view: Zanele Muholi, ZANELE MUHOLI, 2023. Photo by Hayden Phipps. Courtesy of Southern Guild.

A material that has a charged meaning. Speaking of materials with charged meaning, I was curious about your bronze sculptures. Historically, bronze is a medium that is associated with the bronze cast statues of imperialists and colonialists. When you enter into the tradition of this medium, how do you inhabit it? Subvert it?

There’s a connection between the colonial and the traditional in a way. It all depends on how the sculptures were made. If you were talking about steel versus ceramics, each speaks to a different meaning, a different preservation of some sort. When talking about my sculptural pieces, these are Zulu pots that have existed for ages. Maybe beyond, even, the colonisers who took over Africa.

They pre-date bronze.

You get what I’m saying. We’ve been here before. It’s just whoever decided what is art and what’s not. That’s where it differs. In this instance, I’m referencing the Zulu women, their existence in different spaces, and the struggles that they go through. Those people might not be regarded as artists.

It’s seen as “tradition,” not art.

It has been a part of us. There is this notion of what art is and what is not art. Those in power decide who is and is not an artist. In this instance, I’m saying these Zulu pots – the pots and the women, carrying water – they are transcending different spaces.

Zanele Muholi, Umphathi (The One Who Carries), 2023. Photo by Hayden Phipps. Courtesy of Southern Guild.

That makes me think about these sculptures of the uterus and the clitoris and how those have not really been considered subjects of art, historically speaking. How did you become interested in these representations of the body?

In 2016, I had a complicated operation. I had fibroids removed. This is the reference that I wanted to use in this instance. To use a concrete piece of material that speaks about the inside, which is softer than this. It kind of messes with the eye. To say, “Oh wow, it’s the uterus. What does it mean?” I’m basically saying, for every one of us, we carry, or we are carried, by an organ from which all of us come from, regardless of our race, gender, sexuality, class, education and so on. It’s multilayered. This is an organ that is so important.

To life.

To life. It doesn’t matter where each person is located in time and space. It’s timeless. At the same time, it speaks to the history of women and medicine, where there are forced sterilisations, or miscarriages that happen because of carelessness of those who are in charge of the wombs. It speaks on discriminations that have existed for ages. If you are a poor woman, you don’t have access to private medicine that then regards or treats the womb with care. It speaks about the need for public gynaecology, medical care that doesn’t discriminate, that is easily accessible for women, regardless of whether or not they want to use their uterus to carry babies. To say that, I have a right to free medical care. I don’t need to be discriminated against when I go to the gynaecologist who will ask me, “How old are you? When will get a baby? Why have you been careless?” There are a lot of stories that are carried by the womb, the uterus.

And those stories are hidden from popular discourse.

They are hidden. And also, the treatment that women face at the hands of gynaecologists, whether in private or non-private spaces. I just want to open up the dialogue around these topics that are so daily, and yet, they tend to be so taboo. The bleeding body – how often do we talk about that? The media is infested by rape and the killing of women, which is so brutal, in which people’s private parts are torn apart. And yet, there is an issue of girls having free access to sanitary pads. This has to do with the womb. It’s just expensive to have a womb.

When it should be sacred. Or, we should at least acknowledge that, if we came from this, we should organise to protect it.

For female-bodied beings, the womb becomes a point of departure. Whether the person is queer or not, there is that common organ that we share as a people regardless.

Zanele Muholi, Ncinda, 2023. Photo by Hayden Phipps. Courtesy of Southern Guild.

So it seems to me that you’re still very interested in questions of the body.

Questions of power. Questions of the body. Questions on health-related matters. Questions of displacement and violation of female anatomy. A whole lot. So now, we bring these topics into art spaces, because they tend to be freer-thinking-ish.

The show is the first step towards activism.

Conversations need to be had and heard. Before we deal with fine art, and the aesthetics of the art, we have bodies and hearts and wombs and ovaries and livers. All that carries us to these art spaces. I think it’s very important.

We don’t just see with our eyes and think with our minds. Our whole body is involved.

It carries. Basically, I’m saying, all that we have inside carries us. We’re not just moving bodies. There’s something that makes us do what we do. That leads us to temptation. That’s when the topic of sexual pleasure comes into being. Walking through the space, looking at Ncinda, people don’t even know what the clitoris is. They don’t even know the number of holes that they have as a people. It’s about time that we open up to these topics.