Difficult Love & Enraged by a Picture

Zanele Muholi (they/them) is a South African visual activist and photographer. For over two decades, Muholi has documented the lives of Black queer people in South Africa. Muholi views this undertaking as a rewriting of Black queer history in South Africa—"so that the world learns of our resistance and our existence amidst hate crimes in South Africa and beyond." In "Difficult Love" and "Enraged by a Picture", their artistic work is presented in two distinct ways: as a documentary and as a lecture-performance. Both works foreground photography as a form of lived experience and resistance, in which image-making is inextricably linked to questions of identity and survival within Black LGBTQIA+ communities in South Africa. Together, the two films articulate photography as both a document and a form of discourse—one that moves between the personal and the collective, the fixed and the performative, while consistently insisting on the political urgency of visibility.

Zanele Muholi in conversation with Djamila Grandits

In cooperation with FOTO ARSENAL WIEN. The exhibition "Zanele Muholi: We Are Here" will be on view at Foto Arsenal Wien from September 19, 2026, to January 10, 2027.