The highly anticipated second volume in the widely acclaimed and celebrated self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness by Zanele Muholi is here, with it’s first book having won the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation award as the best photography book award.
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of personhood, queerness, blackness, and the possibilities of self. Since the publication of the first volume in 2018, Muholi has continued to photograph themself in a range of new international locations. Drawing on material props found in each environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black individual in today's global society, and most importantly, speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms.
Renée Mussai, curator and historian, brings together written contributions from more than ten curators, poets, and authors, building a poetic and experimental framework that extends the idea of speculative futures and the potentiality of multivalent selves. Powerfully capturing, this collection further amplifies Muholi's expressive and radical manifesto. As they state in the first volume, "My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance-existence as well as insistence."
Their ground-breaking series of Somnyama Ngonyama, where Muholi uses their body as a canvas to confront the politics of race, the Black Lives Matter movement and representation in the visual archive together with Faces and Phases, and where Muholi documents the history of black lesbians and transgender individuals, has been widely exhibited around the world at major museums and galleries including TATE Modern in London, UK; Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African American Art at Harvard University in Boston, USA; Seattle Art Museum, USA; Autograph ABP, London, UK; and Venice Biennale, Italy to name a few. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II is 172 pages available in English and is published by Aperture.
