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Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist, who identifies as nonbinary. Their work focuses on race, gender, and sexuality. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ communities. Their self-proclaimed mission is to revise the visual history of South Africa to refect the Black, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, agender, and asexual experience and opposition in the face of hate crimes. Post-Apartheid in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world to criminalize discrimination based on sexual orientation; the LGBTQIA+ community is still subjected to hate crimes, however.

‘Sine II, Sheraton Hotel, Brooklyn’ (2019) is from the series ‘Somnyama Ngonymama’ translated as ‘Hail the Dark Lioness’ (2012–ongoing), in which Muholi turns the camera on themself. These powerful self-portraits, photographed in different locations around the world and titled in isiZulu, Muholi’s first language, explore themes including labor, racism, Eurocentrism, sexual politics, and South Africa’s social and political history. Muholi uses photographic contrast to emphasize the darkness of their subjects’ skin tones, celebrating their Blackness and reclaiming their identity.

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