Other

http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/index2012.html

CAPE TOWN

26 July - 1 September 2012

ZANELE MUHOLI

MO(U)RNING

STEVENSON is pleased to present MO(U)RNING, a solo exhibition by visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi.

For Muholi, MO(U)RNING evokes death but also suggests the cycle of life as morning follows night. Life and death, love and hate are some of the antitheses that appear throughout her work.

In April this year, Muholi's Cape Town apartment was burgled in what was apparently an attack directed at her visual activism. The lost material was an extensive archive of photographic work, videos and texts documenting hate crimes in South Africa and gender issues in Africa. Among this material was the Queercide project, created by Muholi to denounce and record hate crimes and atrocities committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people.

The loss of this material raised many questions for Muholi. What happen when such images disappear or when a collection of testimonies is erased?

In MO(U)RNING, Muholi presents elements of her documentation that were not lost, together with new work realised in recent months. The exhibition will include new and recent photographs from her Faces and Phases series of portraits and herBeing series. Her multiple award-winning documentary Difficult Love, currently on view at Documenta 13 together with Faces and Phases, will be screened for the first time at the gallery. Photographs of crime scenes and new video works will also form part of the exhibition.

Her work gives public life to a community, its joys, traumas, fights and daily existence. She uses the power of visual material, offered by photographs and film, to affirm existing realities and expose truths and the cruel aspects of 21st century South African society where loving can be dangerous.

By next week 5 September:

• Design a system where by you encounter your Other
• Post this on your blog

Reflect and write on:

• How do I move from stereotyping into actual engagement?
• What activities can I enter in with the Other, which seem natural?
• How will I record the experiences?
• What are my ethical responsibilities?

Please note we will be having Theory in our next history time slot 5 September

Who are you?

The intention for this course is to mine deeper levels of creativity. We do this by tracking specific questions in order to arrive at our authentic selves.

Who are you? prompts us to look at social blind-spots. These are groups of people who 'we do not see'. [Theory U (C. Otto Scharmer)  http://www.ottoscharmer.com/publications/summaries.php] 

The blind-spot potentially holds a store house of creativity. It requires courage and the help of others to look at it.

Our project so far:

• establish your group (facebook and in class) and work with this group as support for you to explore the terrain
• establish your blog and begin to document your process
• at this stage establish:
• the social area you do not see (remember these are people you do not see as individuals, there is a tendency to group, generalise, and stereotype)
• explore the feelings which arise when contemplating this 'group'
• write about this in your journal
• keep your journal private
• your blog is public documentation, not personal process
• explore these feeling responses for the next week
• on 17 August I will post the next part of the process