Renée Mussai – författare

The highly anticipated second volume to the widely acclaimed and celebrated self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark LionessIn Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol. II, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of personhood, queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Since the publication of the first volume in 2018, Muholi has continued to photograph themself in a range of new international locations. Drawing on material props found in each environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black individual in today’s global society, and—most important—speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. Renée Mussai, curator and historian, brings together written contributions from more than ten curators, poets, and authors, building a poetic and experimental framework that extends the idea of speculative futures and the potentiality of multivalent selves. Powerfully arresting, this collection further amplifies Muholi’s expressive and radical manifesto. As they state in the first volume, “My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance—existence as well as insistence.”

A collection of extraordinary 19th-century portraits that radically shifts our understanding of the presence and identities of the Black subject in Victorian Britain.These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of 19th-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain. The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage. Black Chronicles features high quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive’s remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions by Caroline Bressey, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Lola Jaye, Renée Mussai and Val Wilmer, and an afterword by Mark Sealy. Built upon groundbreaking, in-depth new research, Black Chronicles opens up photographic archives to expand and enrich photography’s complex cultural histories and subjectivities, offering an essential insight into the visual politics of race, representation and difference in the Victorian era by addressing this crucial missing chapter.Introduction and texts by Renée Musai, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Text by Paul Gilroy, Text by Stuart Hall, Text by Caroline Bressey, Text by Lola Jaye, Text by M. Neelika Jayawardane, Afterword by Mark Sealy, Text by Val WilmerPublished by Thames & Hudson in partnership with Autograph.

For decades, women have been overlooked in the cultural history of photography, especially Black female and genderfluid artists whose crucial contributions to this relatively young medium are often missing from prevailing narratives. More than just a ‘corrective’, this stunning, image-led anthology features up to one hundred artists and photographers from diverse cultural backgrounds, geographies, and genres. Readers will encounter the pioneering works of Florestine Perrault Collins—one of the few African American women working in photography at the beginning of the 20th century—and iconic imagery by path-shaping artists and visual activists such as Ming Smith, Maud Sulter, Carrie Mae Weems, Lola Flash, Zanele Muholi, Mònica de Miranda, Rahima Gambo, and Aida Silvestri, as well as a remarkable constituency of creative practitioners working with self-portraiture, performance and collage such as Frida Orupabo, Ayana V. Jackson, Nona Faustine, Atong Atem, Hélène Amouzou, Lebohang Kganye, Sethembile Msezane, Heather Agyepong, Khadija Saye, Silvia Rosi and many others. This carefully curated visual gathering stands on its own as an impressive collection of examples of socially-engaged, imaginative and poetic global photographies.