An Art that Never Sleeps
Empedocles said that, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.” The same is true of the experience of every person, of every living creature. We are all the centre of a universe, its most essential point, and at the same time, we are the insignificant circumference forever diffused into eternal space. Standing over Muholi V, the enormous bronze form of a sleeping woman, at the heart of Zanele Muholi’s exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago, this paradox of centrality versus periphery hit us in the guts. The bronze sleeper would never wake up. So why did we feel like we had to tread so quietly around her?
Muholi defines themselves as a “visual activist”. This is the essence of their artistic mission. Their work is not just about beauty or self-expression, although it is beautiful and deeply expressive. It documents lives and histories that have been overlooked, erased, suppressed. Muholi’s art is a stand against the continued violence and discrimination faced by black LGBTQ+ communities in South Africa and beyond. It’s a refusal to let those stories vanish into silence.
Muholi’s art is rooted in the harsh realities of their homeland. South Africa, for all its post-apartheid progress, remains a country where LGBTQ+ people face staggering levels of violence and discrimination. Muholi has spoken about the horrifying practice of “corrective rape” used to try to “convert” lesbian women and the broader societal hostility faced by queer and trans individuals. These brutalities form the backdrop of their work, but Muholi doesn’t respond with images of violence or victimhood. Instead, they use their art to celebrate the resilience and beauty of those who live under constant threat.
One striking aspect of this work is how it shifts between the deeply personal and the grandly theatrical. Their self-portraits are a case in point. These photographs are an act of constant transformation. In each image, Muholi uses costume, makeup, and lighting to reimagine themselves again and again, in fresh guises, impossible to predict, each time driving deeper to find some new layer of self-expression, of revelation. They draw on a wide range of influences: African history, religious iconography, high fashion, and the aesthetics of the absurd. Each portrait tells a story, not just about Muholi but about the world they inhabit. These metamorphoses are re-creations of identity, claiming space in a world that attempts to erase their individuality. Conformity will not triumph.
In one particularly arresting self-portrait, Muholi gazes directly at the camera, their face painted a deep, shining black, adorned with objects that blur the lines between jewellery and armour. They touch something ancient and futuristic with this image, defiant and vulnerable. It speaks to the contradictions at the heart of their work: the tension between visibility and safety, between self-expression and survival.
These self-portraits, an exhibition in themselves, constituted only one room of the Tate’s display. In other sections, they displayed as much mastery of the craft of personal photography of everyday life as they demonstrated control over these flamboyant, choreographed self-explorations. With minimal explicit devices or compositional imposition, they showed us exquisitely simple images of lovers at home, women bathing, families embracing. Two women lying on a bed, their limbs intertwined in a tender embrace. The light is soft, the setting unremarkable, but the image hums with intimacy and defiance. It says, We are here. We love. We live. These pictures are quieter, softer, and yet they’re no less radical. In a society that seeks to marginalize and dehumanize LGBTQ+ people, simply documenting their ordinary lives becomes an act of resistance.
There is no apparent display of political activism in these works, but it isn’t long before you realise that the very images are the political act. The simple display is the act, and the simple lives, cooking or washing or loving, are the act. These domestic scenes remind us that activism needn’t be bombastic or obvious. It is happening in this very quiet moment when cooking a meal, holding a partner’s hand, finding joy in the face of oppression. Muholi’s work captures these moments with a sensitivity that makes them feel universal and deeply specific at the same time.
As world-renowned as they may be for their photographs, it was Muholi’s bronze sculptures that brought us to our knees. Muholi V stopped us in our tracks. This bronze depicts a sleeping woman, her head resting on a pillow, her body so lifelike it seemed to hover on the edge of movement. It was here that a quiet wonder took hold, watching the restless dreams of this centre of the world while she slept. it resonated with the purpose that is behind the our Fragen work. How to get to that heart of what it feels like as a person to be at the centre of all things, and yet to be the whole fringe of the universe which watches on as innumerable points of consciousness express themselves. to be under constant observation observing the world, all at the same time.
This is the experience of being a person. Nothing short of that. The sleeping figure lay there, so bursting with potential, and this is what we aim to uncover when we explore work in the theatre. We want the actor, and not only the actor but the character as well, to be conscious in some way, or to suspect, that they are being watched, that they are under observation. It’s not a breaking of the fourth wall for us, because there is no fourth wall. The heart of Fragen is closer, then, to the exhibition format because performer and spectator are all in a room. The same room. Part of that room, though, is inaccessible. There is an invisible ‘Do Not Touch’ sign that hangs over it, that the audience is well aware of, trained from its youngest age to never transgress. The actors inhabit that space in the same way that a piece of art inhabits the space of ‘don not touch’, where the bronze woman sleeps. But actors and characters are artworks which can, if they so desire, look out of the picture and meet you. Then you must wonder for a moment, who is under exhibition, the actor or you yourself, the audience member.
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