Zanele Muholi

Zibandlela VI, III and II, The Sails, Durban, 2020

Zanele Muholi’s three-part photographic work from 2020, entitled Zibandlela Vl, lll and ll, The Sails, Durban, is a portrait of the artist, who, through complexly staged reflections and refractions, eludes and obscures their own physiognomy and facial expressions, whereby, however, gestures, expressions, and the relationship with the viewer via the gaze are almost oppressively condensed in a provocative reversal. The spatial situation remains disconcertingly open and undefined, though seemingly intimate. In a very immediate manner, the artist comments on gender, queer self-positioning, and identity as a mirrored hall of self-formations that appear and disappear again. Moving beyond this, the artist reflects pictorially on the hair-thin, though almost painfully palpable boundary between, as Arthur Rimbaud formulated it, ‘Je’ and “Je est un autre.”