KEYNOTE: Award-winning photographer Zanele Muholi's images offer a bold stance against the stigmatization of lesbian and gay sexualities in Africa and beyond. The Faces and Phases series of black and white portraits by Zanele Muholi focuses on the commemoration and celebration of black lesbians' lives. Muholi embarked on this project in 2007, taking portraits of women from the townships in South Africa. In 2008, after the xenophobic and homophobic attacks that led to the mass displacement of people in that country, she decided to expand the ongoing series to include photographs of women from different countries. Collectively, the portraits are an act of visual activism. Depicting women of various ages and backgrounds, this gallery of images offers a powerful statement about the similarities and diversity that exist within the human race. AUTHOR: Zanele Muholi has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. In 2009 she won the Casa Africa award for best female photographer at the Recontres de Bamako biennial of African photography, as well as a Fondation Blachere award. 70 duotone illustrations

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness features over ninety of Muholi's evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi's immediate environment. These portraits reflect the journey, self-image, and possibilities of a black woman in today's global society. With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholi's images, this title is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.

"Published to coincide with Zanele Muholi's exhibition Only half the picture at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 29 March-25 April 2006"--T. p. verso.

In Faces and Phases, Zanele Muholi embarks on a journey of "visual activism" to ensure black queer and transgender visibility. Despite South Africa's progressive Constitution and 20 years of democracy, black lesbians and transgender men remain the targets of brutal hate crimes and so-called corrective rapes. Taken over the past eight years, the more than 250 portraits in this book, accompanied by moving testimonies, present a compelling statement about the lives and struggles of these individuals. They also comprise an unprecedented and invaluable archive: marking, mapping and preserving an often invisible community for posterity.

This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa. The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories. Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the “Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world.” This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government’s alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society. Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable. Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.

Impossible Mourning argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has figured largely in public discourse in South Africa over the last ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the multiple losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This profound fact is at the center of this book which explores the significance of the disavowal of AIDS-death in relation to violence, death, and mourning under apartheid. Impossible Mourning shows how in spite of the magnitude of the epidemic and as a result of the stigma and discrimination that has largely characterized both national and personal responses to the epidemic, spaces for the expression of collective mourning have been few. This book engages with multiple forms of visual representation that work variously to compound, undo, and complicate the politics of loss. Drawing on work Thomas did in art and narrative support groups while working with people living with HIV/AIDS in Khayelitsha, a township outside of the city of Cape Town this book also includes analyses of the work of South African visual artists and photographers Jane Alexander, Gille de Vlieg, Jillian Edelstein, Pieter Hugo, Ezrom Legae, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Paul Stopforth, and Diane Victor.

Kiss My Genders celebrates the work of more than 20 international artists whose practices explore and engage with gender fluidity, as well as non-binary, trans and intersex identities.Featuring works from the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the present, and focusing on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender.Working across painting, immersive installations, sculpture, text, photography and film, many of these artists treat the body as a sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty, and representations of the human form.This publication includes texts from writers, theorists, curators, poets and artists who have made key contributions to thinking in the field.From pop culture and gender dissidence to the embrace of the 'monstrous' or 'freaky', from the politics of prose to trans-feminism and politics on the street, each of these writers throws light on a different way of seeing. Also featured is a round-table discussion between a selection of artists and exhibition curator Vincent Honoré.In addition to these original texts, the book reprints a key text by Renate Lorenz and includes poetry by Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard and Nat Raha.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery, London (12 June - 8 September 2019).

The winter issue of Aperture magazine offers a survey of speculations, propositions, and schemes regarding new directions in contemporary photography, focusing on how photographers today respond to the new possibilities offered by technological advancement and dissemination.

This is a critical analysis of contemporary politically engaged art.