 It's been a while, actually, since I've had the pleasure of coming to the forum and introducing our speaker on a weekend. It's been a few years, actually. For those of you who have been here a few years ago and before, I say hello again. And for those of you who are not, I will introduce myself. I'm Elizabeth Sackler. And it has been a while. And I'm so happy to be here and to introduce Pamela Alara. There are a lot of things that are going to be going on this year. It's going to be a very exciting year for the Sackler Center. And during the month of March and into April, we are celebrating the seventh anniversary of the Sackler Center. And we're going to be doing four days of programming over a period of weekend starting March 8th. And it will be titled, the entire series, States of Denial, The Illegal Incarceration of Women, Children, and People of Color. I have been doing workshops up at York Penitentiary and doing a lot of research over the last year. And it is absolutely shocking that we are ignorant of what is going on in this country, in this state, and that, in fact, that we live sort of in a state of denial and feeling a little bit impotent once we know what the problem is. So I do hope you'll be joining us on March 15th, Piper Kerman is coming. The author of Orange is the New Black. And we are also going to be showing crime after crime. And the two lawyers who are involved with that out in California are flying on in. And hopefully in the fall, Michelle Alexander will be coming, who has written The New Jim Crow. And also I'm hoping that Wally Lamb will be able to join us in the fall. Both of those two people have been on book tours for the last year. And so they're exhausted and they said no, no way in the spring. So we're working on the fall months. So the programming will probably extend through the entire year. And I do hope that you will keep an eye out for it, because it's going to be very important and let your friends know we will probably be filling the auditorium. So we'll have more space needed than here. Also on June 5th, mark your calendars. The Sackler Center first awards and this year we are honoring Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. And that is going to be a very exciting afternoon. It will start at four o'clock. Anita will be here, of course. She will be speaking and we will be screening Anita a new documentary about Anita Hill and those years that many of us remember Osowell. And so that should be also quite wonderful. So thank you very much for joining. You know, today is kind of a great day. It's sort of a perfect day for a museum. It's not too cold. It's not too hot. It's not pouring rain. It's not snowing. And it's not the first day of spring. And it feels like every time I've stood here and welcomed people, there has been a reason for me to say, I'm so glad you're here. It's such a gorgeous day outside or, well, it was brave of you to. So anyway, welcome. And I hope this is going to be an exciting afternoon for you. I'm delighted to be here with you. I met Pamela Azara up in Boston at Boston College. There was a panel discussion at Boston College Visual, Culture, Media and Gender. And she and I were on the same panel. And one of the exciting pieces of being on panels, I find, is that you get to meet other panelists and get to hear other panelists. And it's very often very thrilling and very good partnerships are made. So I asked Pamela if she would come down and speak with us today. And she said, indeed, that she would. And I would like to read her introduction to you and then present her and ask you to help me welcome her. So Pamela Azara is associate professor emerita of Brandeis University. And I will say myself that hearing Pamela speak, you remind me, Pamela, of a kind of professor or teacher in high school that you wish you had or that you remember that you had. She is an art historian, a curator, a critic. She is the author of monograph on the American painter Alice Neal, Pictures of People, Alice Neal's American Portrait Gallery. Her recent research has investigated issues such as whiteness and gender identity in contemporary South African art. In 2003, she co-organized the exhibition Coexistence, Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis and in South Africa National Gallery in Cape Town. During 2005-06 academic year, she co-organized with Peter Propst, is that how you pronounce his name? Propst. Peter Propst, Cross Currents in Recent African Video Installation, Water as Metaphor for Identity for the Tufts University Art Gallery. And in 2012, she organized the Boston-Yoburg Collection Collaboration and Exchange at Artists Proof Studio 1983-2012, also at Tufts University. Her articles have been published in African Art, Ninka, Ninka, and Art, among others. She is currently a visiting professor in the African Studies Center at Boston University. I'm very, very pleased to have you here, Pamela. Please help me welcome Pamela Alara. With thanks again to Elizabeth Sackler for inviting me here to the center. I am really excited to be here and really excited about the work that's done here. I should just let you know that this will be a general lecture, so I'm not assuming that you know a lot about South African art to begin with. But I'm also hoping that there'll be a general parallel that you'll find with American politics as well. The male chauvinists in our Congress are succeeding in overturning everything that was gained about equal rights for women from the 70s on. And so I hope that this will be some way to stir us all up just a little bit. To do that I will quote the latest from Mike Huckabee, which I'm sure you have all heard, but this is what the former governor said and also on his widely distributed radio show. Democrats tell women they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them with a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government. So how long is it that we have to wait before we take action against such bloviating and its consequences? The reason I study the relationship of art to politics in South Africa is that I can do so dispassionately, whereas I lose it when thinking about the state of American politics. So at any rate there will be a few parallels that I make, but otherwise I will keep to South Africa. Finally, I do want to thank my granddaughter for giving me this cold, which means that I will be honking in my way through this lecture, hopefully not too disruptively. During the 1980s, when feminist art and theory flourished in the United States and the activism of the second wave of feminism had led to positive changes in women's lives, feminist concerns were downplayed in South Africa as political activism was forcefully directed at toward ending the oppressive apartheid regime. As art historian Lisa Aronson has written in the new latest journal of African arts, during this decade of successive states of emergency and the violent conflicts involved in the efforts to overthrow the apartheid regime, there was a sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit agreement that gender politics would be suspended until national liberation had been achieved. At its tentative beginnings, however, feminist practice and scholarship has established a solid presence over the last 30 years. And in general, the trajectory of feminism in South Africa has followed that of the United States and Europe, beginning primarily as a white middle class issue, then refocusing to encompass non-Western and non-white positions, and most recently adopting the term gender in order to be inclusive of issues of masculinity and sexual orientation. The three artists I will discuss, each born a decade apart, can roughly serve to represent the different issues within South African feminism. So Penteciopis, here on the left, born in 1953, has based her work firmly in Western feminist theory. So Penteciopis, on the left, there, has based her work firmly in Western feminist theory, while also wrestling with the complex intersections of race and gender in South African society. Bernie Searle, who's in the center here, has confronted the controversies over the categorizing of the non-white female body, while interrogating the very notion of identity, and Zanelli Mahali, born 1972, I guess I'm going to point, has provided an assertive presence for the LGBTI communities that continue to be marginalized and threatened in South Africa. All three challenge the historical invisibility of women and women's issues, not only during the anti-apartheid struggles, but also in the present day. My premise is that in the South African context, feminist concerns are never separate from other political and social concerns. And I just would mention I haven't published anything on any of these artists, so I am expecting some critique from all of you for these provisional ideas. As in the United States, we do have these three phases of feminism. But with the coming in of multiculturalism and postmodernism in the 80s, there was also a thrust in South Africa by the 90s toward a spirit of reconciliation, fostered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings of the late 90s. And the passage of that constitution that guaranteed equal rights for every citizen regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. It's this inspiring idea of equality and inclusivity promised by the new democracy, President Mandela's vision of the rainbow nation, that all of these artists, but especially Mahali, continue to interrogate in their work. Actually feminist issues tend to be put aside in politics and scholarship today. And to use an embarrassing case in point, the companion to modern African art published this December to 2013. In that text, fewer than 20 pages of a 625 page book even mention gender issues, even though the editors of that anthology are both women. And here's my contribution. My own essay on Zuletum Etetra in that volume addresses gender on one page. So mea culpa. I hope this lecture will help make up for that. It's also important to make one final introductory remark before turning to the often controversial work of Penny Silvis. Certainly one important contribution of feminist scholarship from among others, Rosika Parker in England and most definitely Judy Chicago in the United States as you can see from the dinner party installation has been the erasure of the traditional hierarchy between art and craft. And South Africa certainly signs on to that erasure. For example, and it's important to recognize that needlework collectives have been a really important source of feminist activism. And they have a long history of contributing not only to poverty alleviation, but also to supporting women's agency. In a number of her publications, South African feminist art historian Brenda Schmaman has charted the increased awareness of women, of women's concerns on the part of participants on these needlework collectives, especially around the difficult issues of HIV AIDS. Because of the majority of collectives were established by women artists, it is in such settings that the longstanding feminist idea of collaboration is maintained as a central focus. Reaching the experiences of the more privileged founders with those of the often disadvantaged participants. In turn, these collectives emerged from the community-based art centers that provided the only access to arts training available to blacks under apartheid. The title of Lastina Lachis, wonderful narrative cloth that's on the board here, Community, is an iconic word in South African art. Many of South Africa's most accomplished contemporary artists, including Zanella Maholi, began their training in community-based art centers throughout the country. So with apologies for this overly long introduction, I will turn now to Penny Siopis, whom I have chosen to stow the title of matriarch of South African feminism, justified or not. Siopis received her undergraduate degree in painting from Rhodes University in Bramstown, where formalist principles of abstract painting were sponsored. When she traveled to England to study at the Portsmouth Polytechnic University in 1970s, she encountered feminist art and theory for the first time, and her art has joined South African politics with feminist theory ever since. Moreover, her courses in feminist art at the University of the Spodersrand and currently at University of Cape Town, initiated in 1984, have had considerable influence on the current generation of women artists. To those who have accused feminism of being a foreign import, irrelevant to South Africa's racial struggles, Siopis replies that gender issues are of equal importance, as racial justice is inseparable from gender justice. So let us begin with two works that exemplify this fraught intersection of race and gender theory and politics in Siopis' early work. Dora and the Other Woman from 1987, just here, 88, is a pastel that resulted from her residency in Paris in 1986. At that time, aware of the racist representations of the South African Poisson woman, Sachi Bartmann, the so-called Hot and Tot Venus, Siopis visited the Musee de Lume, where in 1816, the brilliant comparative anatomist and first class racist, Charles Cuvier, had dissected and preserved Bartmann's body as an example of the specimen of the barbarian race of blacks. In an important essay published the year before Siopis' visit, black bodies, white bodies, toward an iconography of female sexuality in late 19th century art, medicine, and literature, quite a mouthful for a title, Emory University professor, Sandra Gilman, had argued that 19th century scientific belief in the primitive and atavistic nature of the black race could be found as well in early modern European painting. To support his argument, he used the widely distributed illustrations of the Hot and Tot Venus, such as the one on the screen here, as a source in popular culture for paintings by Manet, Picasso, and others. And finally, connecting his analysis with Freud's dark continent of female sexuality, or what he terms the other as sexualized female, Gilman concluded that the line from the secrets possessed by the Hot and Tot Venus to 20th century psychoanalysis runs reasonably straight. And I think that Siopis was very influenced by this essay, as we all were at the time in reading it. And the Freudian influences, the critique of Freudian ideas are seen from this point on in her art. So made on her return, her pastel explores a major concern of feminist art at the time, the question of how the female body has been represented in Western art and literature in order to assure her subordinate positioning. Simultaneously, Dora announces a key theme in Siopis' work from henceforth, and that is the disruptive destabilizing potential of female sexuality, whether black or white. Conjoining the tragic story of Bartman, who until her untimely death was displayed naked as a freak specimen to English and French spectators. With Freud's study of Dora, in which the good doctor diagnosed the young Austrian woman's hysteria as resulting from repressed sexuality, Siopis displays how each woman is othered by seeing. However, she takes care to indicate how power relations played out differently depending on the subject's race. By pinning the caricatures of Bartman to Dora's dress, she uses two different representational systems. So Dora is painted illusionistically, while the other, that is the hot and hot Venus, is seen in terms of secondhand, obviously, clearly racist caricatures. So in that sense it seems to me that what Siopis is saying is that we can't ask for some sort of simplistic sisterhood during the period of the state of emergency. That race does play in here and we can't assume that all women are the same. In the lower left hand corner of this small work, and it's a little hard to see on the far left there, there's a black woman's hands jutting out and peeling a lemon. The lemon peeler comes out from behind the curtain in a painting from the following year, 1988, Patience on a Monument, a History Painting. This painting is now considered a monument of resistance art of the 1980s, when artists were committed to making overtly politicized images that would contribute to the struggle against apartheid. So instead of being presented with a figure of liberty leading the people, as we would expect in a history painting, we're presented with a domestic servant seated on a rubble consisting of battle scenes and other images Siopis tore from the history textbooks she had studied as a child. The source of this composition is a Thomas Nast editorial cartoon, Patience on a Monument depicting a discouraged black man, which was published in Harper's Weekly in 1868, a commentary on the lack of progress toward equality during American reconstruction. In layering this reference, we hardly expect to sort of know this right away, although we should know it as part of our own American history. But nonetheless, the general message of her work does carry. According to a leader and historian of the resistance art movement, Sue Williamson, by featuring a black woman engaged in simple domestic activity as the dominant feature of history, figure of history, and by reducing the hundreds of battling male figures to the size of ants, Siopis effectively deconstructs patriarchal and racist values that justified colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. In other words, Siopis' painting is in equal parts activist and feminist. In joining feminism with political activism, Siopis, I repeat, was ahead of her time, even though she had unflinchingly courageous colleagues such as Sue Williamson. For example, despite the fact that Siopis had started teaching feminist theory back in the 80s, the first academic conference to address feminism, the Conference on Women and Gender in Southern Africa at the University of Natal, did not take place until 1991. In her essay on the conflicts that emerged at that conference, the University of the Western Cape Professor Desiree Lewis argues that given feminism's tentative emergence from the anti-apartheid struggles for equality of all races, the white organizers apparently thought that they did not need to address race in their presentations. When the black delegates protested, the dismissive response was that the conference was academic, not political, as if you could ever separate the two. Their failure to acknowledge the knowledge, the knowledge powered dialectic had a racial form, and it was evident in the jaw-dropping conference logo printed on its folders and book bags there on the left. Yes. A perfect example of what Gilman would call stereotypical otherness, and I would call about as politically incorrect as you possibly could get during the time when Mandela, this is 1991, had just been released from prison and was calling for the returns of Barton's remains to be buried on the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Another embarrassing moment for us feminists, but we have to confess when these things happen. Internal conflicts and debates have always been part of feminism, and so I will proceed to two other examples of conflict. In 1995, at the Generations and Geographies Conference organized by Griselda Pollock at the University of Leeds, the question that predominated was how the voices of non-white and non-Western women were shifting the existing feminist discourse. In the midst of the arguments over who could or should speak for whom, Seopas was told that she should never be allowed to make images of black people. Rejecting such dictates, she insisted that declining to engage publicly with such fraud experiences is not really an option for me. This directive for political correctness from white feminists gained hurricane force in 1997 when Aquian Resort's essay reframing the black subject ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African art was published just as the second Johannesburg biennial for which he was the chief curator was opening. The essay is summarized as follows. The spectacular black other of colonial history as exemplified in the figure of Sarchi Bartmann is no less abject and marginal figure in the contemporary intellectual and cultural production of white South Africans. So he claimed from his personal experience to see that whites were not willing to yield power after 1994 and the new democratic elections and saw the same thing happening with white South African artists. And he cited in specific Candace Brightes whose work is on the left there her ghost series saying that Brightes' use of old photographs, prints and postcards which through and I quote, the bisecting, coloring, whiting and ghosting out, morphing and collaging of the black figure within the field of representation perpetuate a fantasy of white identity predicated on the black body as eternally abject. His colleague also a Nigerian born academic, a little guibi, piled things on immediately and called Brightes psychotic. I would argue that instead, Brightes was just following and part of the postmodernist movement at the time that was challenging stereotypes by appropriating images from popular culture. So where these harsh, we can't really figure out exactly why there would be such harsh criticism of the more prominent white women artists at the time by these men but it's not something that is unusual. So I don't know if any of you know about a recent conflict that happened around a painting by another white artist male in this case, Brett Murray called The Spear that was exhibited last year at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg and it was, I'm sorry, I don't have the picture with me but at any rate it showed President Zuma in this literally like way it happened to be based on a portrait of Lenin but he is not carrying a spear, his spear is his genitals which are hanging out of his pants and this did not go over big at all with the powers that be and so the painting was defaced and then a huge brouhaha ensued. So basically this is one of the things that makes South African art exciting and keeps you on your toes and get with your arguments at the ready. At any rate at this point, C. Opus does begin to examine whiteness issues as part of that larger examination of race as something which can no longer be justified as a term biologically for sure but also had specific resonances for South Africa and so the first of that was her lovely indeed, My Lovely Day is the name of the film that she made in 1997 from home movies from her youth. So, however, because for C. Opus, race and feminism and generally was a problematic category as it will be for Searle as well, she has preferred the term alterity or what she has called the notion of an unrecoverable strangeness that tries to undo debates around selfhood and otherness. This is involved working across what she calls the terrain of trauma, the history that surfaced through the truth and reconciliation commission hearings and in her words are reflective today of an estrangement and dislocation that come with a deep uncertainty about the stability of what we might call the social contract. So I just want to look at two last works quickly before we move on to Bernie Searle. This is an example of the shame series, a series of small gawashes and prints that she made between 2002 and 2007 and it depicts a mahogany colored young women in each of them. They have an indeterminate race obviously who were pummeled by shame and guilt. To me, they're very deeply disturbing images of sexual trauma in a country where rape and sexual abuse are rampant. The child women speak to innocence and vulnerability while at the same time pointing to the uncontrollable erotic desires that rack the body during puberty. Is their trauma the result of sexual violation as it's suggested maybe by the words or their own actions? Are they the counterpart of the young female student that Professor David Lurie seduced in J. M. C. Cia's novel Disgrace from 1999 and that in the end caused Lurie to lament. I am sunk into a state of disgrace trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. But are we doing both image and novel a disservice to read them in simplistic terms as a metaphor for white guilt? I am not really sure so I'd love your opinions. But maybe Marlene Dumas, her compatriot, an ex-patriot artist, can shed some light here with her many disturbing images of Preppy's progressant girls. In these provocative paintings Dumas substituted the full allegorical figure once again for these little children. In these unsettling paintings the concept of equality, liberty and justice can be seen as a threatening, even perverse triumvirate and a cautionary tale about the challenges to be met in making those ideals a reality. So she painted these paintings right before the Constitution was accepted and right after the first democratic elections. Both Siopas and Dumas expand upon another feminist concern during the 1990s, the female body as a site of objection. And this is a term that comes into being in the 60s and gets elaborated in Julia Costeva's 1982 essay, The Powers of Horror, in which the body's secretions, be it spittle, blood, urine, etc., make the woman's body in particular a site of objection. And actually this whole idea sort of became a cliche by the 1990s. But with the shame series, Siopas like Dumas and maybe even Kara Walker in the U.S. is able to register the ghastly histories of oppression in their homelands on the bodies of individuals. Objection in all of these cases is a matter of vomiting up force fed histories and imposed identities. Now, because of worrying about time constraints and cowardice, I am going to skip over this example of her recent work on the Knife Edge series from 2008 to the present, in which she's working on large canvases that are made out of glue and ink. It's an incredibly difficult process to control. And in this issue, in Ambush here from 2008, she is taking from Mahokusai, print from the 19th century and depicting the coupling of the woman with to occupy. So, we can deal with the issue of fantasy, of disruptive eroticism, of the woman with to occupy. Or we can ask, is there a bridge with this work that is very difficult to discuss with an interview that Mahali commented on last year, that black women in South Africa, and this is clearly not a black woman, but black women are asked to bear children with a male head of household, a true woman, men's property. So, we'll see how this bears out, and if there's some sort of link we can make to Mahali's work. Still, I will insist that Siopis continues to link feminism with South African history, even if her own words indicate otherwise. In her conversation with art historian Sarah Nuttall, Siopis has remarked that another work from the On the Knife Edge series, Migrants here on the board from 2008, was stimulated by witnessing birds consuming swarms of flying ants in her backyard after a storm, and she has stated that the painting is not about migrants, other than through different kinds of associations. I beg to differ. Some in the audience may remember that beginning in May 2008, a series of vicious xenophobic outbreaks swept throughout South Africa, and by June 62 people had died. Hundreds had been injured, and tens of thousands had been displaced. In a way, it could be seen as a tragic and bitter end to Mandela's utopian vision of a rainbow nation. In Go Home or Die Here, violence, xenophobia, and the reinvention of Difference in South Africa published that year, 2008. The author suggested that any attempt to understand this conflict should be located in the politics of failed government development and delivery. How can this work not be interpreted as an allegory of that moment, or as another of Siopis' powerful history paintings? I do wonder why she is so committed to ambiguity and evasiveness in describing the painting, but I'll have to put that down to not wanting her work pinned down too precisely. The same is true with Bernie Searle. But the uncontrollable eruption of violent energy depicted here, let's give us a sense of the pent-up frustration that unleashed that horrible violence. And to give Siopis her due, this last of her paintings, to be presented here is hardly a return to the resistance art of the 80s era. Like Bernie Searle, she is registering historical events through the politics of the body that is viscerally turning now to Bernie Searle, whose work is most assuredly rooted in the senses. I have mentioned that the issues of identity, including gender identity, emerged with force for the post-apartheid generation of artists after 1994. After all, the truly progressive South African Constitution of 1996 offers the following guarantees. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, color, sexual orientation, age, disability, religious, conscience, belief, culture, language, and birth. Can we add any more? Can we think of any others? Pretty great, though, all and all, to have those guarantees. Bernie Searle, whose work came to prominence in the latter half of the 1990s, has used her own body to juxtapose those constitutional guarantees with the reality that the female body in South Africa continues to be subject to various forms of violence and oppression. As a person classified as colored under apartheid, Searle was well positioned to interrogate concepts of identity. Born in 1964 in Cape Town and raised there, she received her BAFA from the Calis School of Art at the University of Cape Town and her MFA from the same institution and sculpture in 1992. Like Seopas, she was influenced initially by European and American art and theory, but in this instance, her sources were primarily black writers and artists, including Cobina Mercer, Carrie May Weems, Pap Ford Williams, and Lorna Simpson. I would just say with the Carrie May Weems show that just opened at the Guggenheim, there are sort of wonderful parallels that one can find with the works of Bernie Searle. In 1997, she showed with these artists in the Johannesburg Biennial exhibit of this one curated by Kelly Jones called Life's Little Necessities, so she was shown with Williams and Simpson and others. It is likely that these artists, therefore, influenced her shift from sculpture at that time to photography-based installation. So her work, this is a Lorna Simpson, which would have been one of the models from which she could work from 1989. And this is her installation in the Life's Little Necessities exhibition. It was there that she decided that she would use spice for the first time in this punningly titled Come Fort. It was installed in the kitchen of Cape Castle and outlined the Fort Star in Paprika. Searle was familiar with Indonesian, that is, Cape Malay, culture and cuisine, as prepared in her childhood home. Even though, as far as she knows, she herself is not descended from slaves from East Indies, the placement of Paprika in that specific location, the kitchen, carried a feminist message pertaining to the enslavement of women that resulted from colonization. Quoting Sue Williamson again, the castle was once the stronghold of the colonizing Dutch East India Company. In the 17th century, the company ships transported spices from the East Indies to Europe via the Cape, picking up fresh vegetables for their crews and dropping off slaves to work in the company gardens at Cape Town en route. Searle continued to use spices as a medium for the next two years, and in the Color Me series from 1998-9, she worked with her friend and collaborator, Jean Bundred, who photographed Searle's face and upper torso covered in Cape Malay spices. The very colors of the spices, red Paprika, brown cloves, white pea flower and yellow turmeric, make a mockery of her own racial classification as colored, and although she is immobile, silent, literally smothered by these burning spices, in the first two images on the screen here, nonetheless, in the looking back of the series from 1999, she defiantly returns the gaze. So the fact that the spices are suffocating her suggests that other identities rooted in cultures and traditions gendered female may be as oppressive and arbitrary as racial classifications. So the series traces which I showed you first with its nod to Anna Mendiata, as well as the billboard image not quite white made for the One City Festival in Cape Town in 2000, continue this investigation. And though not quite white, it's a particularly straightforward political comment about mismeasurement and misrepresentation. But I want to say that despite its simplicity and directness, it does just what Siopis does and that is layer references to South African history and politics. So she may be referring to Marlene Dumas painting Snow White with a Broken Arm from 1988, where the figure continues to take documentary photographs despite her being beaten unconscious by malignant white dwarfs of the apartheid government. And also in the image below, to Paul Stopforce iconic elegy for Steve Biko from 1981, based on smuggled photographs of the black consciousness movements leaders mangled corpse. So this is again my main argument, that these layered references are what characterizes South African feminism, rooting it in its own specific history and politics. And Searle's first video work made in 2001 titled Snow White, the artist kneels naked while white pea flower falls from above to cover her body and the floor around her. And when the snow stops, she makes a loaf of roti bread out of the flower, connecting it again to traditional female labor. But it seems to me in this sense with this important video, the question is not a victimization, but of nurturance and endurance. And in addition Searle's body is neither vulnerable nor erotic. In fact it appears fairly androgynous. One might argue that both her race and her gender are rendered ambiguous, denying a core identity. So this idea of a fluidity of identity and a concomitant delusion and loss of cultural heritage resulting from migration and displacement will become a dominant theme in Searle's work from 2001 on, as seen as home and away. And in the one Getchi Mutu exhibition, which is just fabulous, which is right next door here, she also deals with that issue of the whole question of black diaspora in her work as well. But in this, the work that I want to show you, which is about to forget from 2005, she uses a metronome beat of dripping water and three silhouettes appear made of crepe paper that leech their color into the surrounding water. The simple silhouettes we call paper dolls we created in childhood, a compelling metaphor for the construction of identity. So these could be any family or historical news photographs, but Searle has specifically said that she took them from her own family sources. And her family was torn apart by internal disputes. Both the local politics of apartheid and more recent global economic flows have dispersed or torn apart the family unit, bleaching out the memories, the constructive sense of self. So here is the three minute video. So she's insisted that her work, based as it is in her body, is personal and poetic, not political. But as with Siobis, for some of us, it's impossible not to connect the personal closely with South African politics. I'll enlist a slightly edited comment from Nadine Gordemer here. Quote, there may be a particular connection between sexuality, sensuality, and politics uniquely inside South Africa, because after all, what was apartheid all about? It was about the body. Like Siobis' migrants, the two-channel video from 2008 called Mute is a response to the xenophobic outbreaks of that year. So there's a policeman drawing a line around a side of a dead body, the drifting ash suggesting it was perhaps the body of the Mozambique in bricklayer, who had been hacked with a machete and set on fire. On the right, Searle's face appears, wiping away tears on her sleep, while X-shaped crosses flowed down in front of her, perhaps symbolizing those whose lives have been x'd out. Neither Searle nor Siobis were caught up in the violence of those days, but neither are they separate from it, from it as Searle's diptych indicates. The events register emotionally deep in the body. There's no sound, as there is no way to conceptualize this horror. No words for ashamed, this profound, as Annie E. Koons has noted in her essay, The Sound of Silence. In contrast to Searle's, and Siobis's, sometimes elusive work, Zanella Maholi is unapologetically political and presents us with a strong, clear, and unmistakably African voice. This widely reproduced self-portrait, with its steady gaze, presents us with an individual who is intensely focused and determined, and as we shall see, fearless. Nonetheless, despite its unequivocal directness and, I'm sorry, my first impression of her work was rather home. Her photographs are not formally or technically innovative. Rather, they follow the formulas for documentary portrait and ethnographic photography that have been in place since the 19th century. Well, that was my first 30 seconds with her work, until I was bowled over by the powerful presence that her portraits present us with. Maholi can be seen as exemplifying the positive achievements of the New South Africa, and Maholi has graciously acknowledged the educational opportunities provided by the advanced photography course she took in 2004 at the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg. Indeed, it's a point of pride for her that the workshop continued the legacy of its founder, the prominent activist photographer David Goldblatt. Maholi began to investigate her work to investigate this thing in my way here. She began to investigate the invisible world of lesbianism while enrolled in the Market Photography Workshop and exhibited her work for the first time immediately after completing the program. This early image of breast binding on the left speaks eloquently to the private efforts of those engaged in changing gender assignments, whereas ordeal on the right suggests the violence that often results. So much for ambiguity or layering of meaning. Her work is to know what it is in the South African context to say, we're here and we're queer. Like Ciotis and Searle before her, if her basic insistence on her human rights is clear, her stereotyping of her sitters is strenuously avoided. If Ciotis explores sexuality and its margins in the ambush painting we saw earlier, Maholi as an out lesbian traverses the spectrum of sexual orientations and its presentations. It's generally accepted today that sexuality is fluid and that its expression along a broad continuum changes location over the course of a given lifetime. Maholi's individual portraits freeze one moment along a sliding spectrum. Nonetheless, are there examples of positions on that spectrum? They are individuals, citizens whose rights under the constitution deserve to be honored. According to Brennan Monroe, she pushes the limits of what can be shown in post-apartheid public culture. Focusing initially on lesbians, Zanella Maholi's portraits of the LGBTI communities in her ongoing Faces and Faces project, providing a certain presence for individuals often scorned or even actively persecuted in a society that still remains predominantly patriarchal and homophobic. How much so? South Africa's current president, James Zuma, was tried, brought to trial in 2005 for what might have been a corrective rape of his HIV positive niece. He defended his practice of unsafe sex while denying it was a rape by saying that he took a shower after it, leading the irrepressible Maryland guardian cartoonist, Zapiro, to depict him to this day with a showerhead halo. The following year, on Heritage Day, the Bolivianist Zuma called homosexuality a disgrace to the nation and to God. Despite the constitution, the ongoing victory represented by the current administration has prevented the legal citizenship of the LGBTI community from becoming living citizenship for them. Given the statements from South Africa's leaders, those who contribute to the brutal oppression found in both urban and rural settings can find support through words and actions of government officials. And I'm going to provide one more example. In 2009, Lou Luzing Wana, the Minister of Arts and Culture, refused to give her prepared speech at the opening of the exhibition Innovative Women, after seeing the Holy's immoral photographs. Sadly, if ironically, the exhibition was held on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, the very place where the Constitution was drafted and accepted and where the Supreme Court is held today. Strange to say, during the 1990s, the common cause between gay rights and feminism was not even debated, even though the separate groups were politically active at the time. While the first feminist conference, as we've seen, was held in 1991, the first gay rights parade was held the previous year in 1990, and Matthew Krause and Kim Berman's The Invisible Ghetto, which is the first anthology of gay writings, was published in 1993. And even though gay rights operated at a remove from feminism, the issue was once again inexplicable from race, as Berman, who is white, observed. Apartheid and the privileges of whites in South Africa have given disproportionate exposure to the presence of the white, gay and lesbian community. This has contributed to the belief, held by many black South Africans, that homosexuality is an un-African, white, Western phenomenon. And of course the same was said of feminism. In compiling a lesbian history of South Africa, Berman continues. This is an area that requires much exposure, end quote. In her 2012 text, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come, Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom, Berman Roe has added that this is still the case, arguing that because of his relative newness, gay rights could symbolize the new South Africa, on the one hand, but it could also symbolize foreign and un-African. And it is fascinating that in her chapter on post-apartheid gay writing, and again this was published just a year ago, the field is so thin that she has to turn to a visual artist, Zanelli Baholi, confessing that there are so few texts representing same sex female, much less black female relationships, that the voice of black South African lesbians is not a writer, but a photographer. Spanning enormous cultural gaps then, Baholi's visual activism has had to operate on three fronts, feminism, gay rights and racial identity, providing visibility for a community whose sense of internal exile parallels the new xenophobia, according to Monroe, in presenting her diverse community to us. Baholi will deny us the privilege of a distanced, mastering gaze, instead will be surrounded by the images, unable to calculate the exact number of people in the room, or to reduce its members to a type. Further, we're presided with certain information on the label, names and their hometown, but we're not given their sexual orientation, their work, or their general gender identity. The sitters are calm and self-possessed and apart from the women in the Only Half the Picture series from 2006, in general, project a little of the real danger faced by non-hetero individuals, especially women, in a country where 500,000 people are raped yearly and they include children, the myth persists that rape will cure HIV, and the curative worry of lesbians. Facing continual threats to her own safety, Baholi has responded by becoming a founding member of a few, the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and posting stories about her sitters, including incidents of violence and murder on the website in Caniso, which means illumination or life. Given her national and international prominence, prominence, the urge to erase her, to steal her voice, is powerful. In 2012, her Cape Town apartment was burglarized, and more than 20 hard drives containing the last five years of her work were stolen. When she continues on documenting, for example, the funerals of 10 lesbians who were murdered last year. In other words, despite the odds, Baholi has persevered in creating her own contemporary archive. The archive, as a repository of history, is a major concern in South African art today, as exemplified by the exhibit at the current 55th Venice Biennale and the South African pavilion there. It was titled Imaginary Fact, Contemporary South African Art and the Archive. As the exhibit made clear, the coming of democracy and majority approval has entailed a radical reassessment of South African history. Repositories of archives, universities, libraries, museums, have been rethinking how history should be taught and presented, and how archives can release different kinds of information about the past. So, what I initially saw as a conservative formalism in Maholi's work was that an explicit reference to the visual archives that have served classifying type of various races and ethnic groups. For example, the Irish-born photographer Alvin R. Duggan-Crowman, so a leather-volume Bantu tribes of South Africa, compiled between 1928 and 1954, is perhaps the most well-known and extensive of these. Maholi's three-quarter view, three-quarter length portraits sent against an indeterminate ground are so similar in format that were almost required to reconsider the authenticity of Duggan-Crowman's images, which, however beautiful, happened to be anachronistic. And in fact, he often had to supply the garb, the tribal garb the sitters wear. I may be wrong, but it appears to me as if Maholi's Bula series from 2010 is on one level a direct response to Duggan-Crowman's ethnographic enterprise, and certainly critiques it. As one might imagine, there are relatively few precedents for Maholi's LGBTI archive. The work of Jean Brundert, who as I mentioned earlier collaborated with Bernie Searle on the Color Me series, does provide one example. In her photographs, Brundert has presented her lesbian life in a frank, but gentle and often witty way. And what she found was when she exhibited this charming work in the 1998-1999 years, she found that the positive commentary on lesbian relationships was precisely what people objected to. But if Maholi was being beside Brundert's concern with her own white lesbianism, she clearly agreed with the second statement, and so far she wants to present positive images rather than focusing primarily on victimization and violence. In this, both artists continue the tradition of South African activist documentary photography, as in the Carnegie Study of Poverty in South Africa, The Coordined Heart, edited by Omar Bachi in 1984, which also, in its exploration of poverty, downplayed victimization and insisted on establishing relationships between sitter and photographer. Again, this broad and deep tradition of committed politically-based photography, of which all black is a part, is perhaps the most significant archive on which Maholi has drawn. In the being series from 2007, Maholi not only presented individuals with whom she had worked collaboratively to produce portraits, she also represented intimate relationships between couples, a major concern for Brundert as well. And so this is one of them here, which I think really gives you the sense of intimacy. I'm going to skip by the words she did at MIT, just because of time constraints. The relative success of images somewhere, terrific somewhere, matters less than how they are presented. And as I mentioned, Maholi's photographs are available not only in the museum center, but on the publicly accessible space of the internet. For example, a recent posting on Inconiso this past September included Maholi and Zendili Makuba's collaborative portraits of participants in the 2013 Soweto Pride Day. If in her Color Me series, Searle referenced the centuries of silence of the non-white female voice. In contrast, the three-quarter cohorts in the Soweto Pride Day image belong to the hip post-apartheid generation. This new generation is also documented in the street photographs of Lolo Vallejo, and there's examples of first street photographs from Johannesburg as well. In both images, clothing is used creatively to assert non-traditional identities. One might argue that these confident, creative individuals exemplify subversive resistance to all gender categories. Significantly, the post-apartheid generation is performing its created identities in public and non-simply in the art gallery. And yet, Maholi certainly does not ignore ongoing gender violence as seen in her very personal film Difficult Love made in 2010 with Peter Goldsmith. I haven't seen this film, so I'm relying on published descriptions. In a scene on the street where she shows her photographs to a group of black virginity testers, one responds, I would never allow my child to take such photographs. Something like this gives a bad picture to us as virginity testers and black people. This whole thing is for whites because the photographs cause people to become gay. In these women's minds, same-sex orientation still remains a white phenomenon, threatening to destroy traditional cultural values. And I imagine that the women would not be particularly impressed with the fact that Maholi has been in our Basel in 2011, documentary in 2012, and the Venice Biennale in 2013. And it's interesting to me that she goes ahead and continues to work on the streets to change minds, to make change in that society she's connecting up. And of course, as we know, the debates over gay rights and traditional cultural values dominate the news here as well. In a recently released film, God Loves Uganda, director Roger Ross Williams documents the missionary efforts of a church in Kansas, IHOP, the International House of Prayer. This is not a joke. There are efforts to bring the country's message of the sin of homosexuality to Uganda, the supporting that country's proposed law imposing the death penalty for same-sex relationships. This is why, among many other reasons, the work that Zanela Maholi is doing is so important. And so I have felt that she deserves, oh, here's, oh no, no, no, the last word. All I can do is hope. This is, what I want to show you is a human rights watch documentary. That's 10 minutes long. There's a special star that shines Every evening in your eyes A special star that shines It's gonna hit a lullaby How are you doing, Vaseline? I'm Zanela Maholi, reporting live from South Africa. I'm a visual activist. I take photographs. The kind of work that I do is on queer politics, gender politics, politics of race. I'm fascinated by LGBTI individuals in different spaces. I've learnt how beautiful this place is, how important our lives are We should preserve a history about our own people, about us. Very, very interesting township. I've done a lot of shots here. I shot the first gay wedding here in 2002. I don't even know that there are lesbians who own dogs. This is for the first time that I know someone. Put on the top. The light is good here. I'm going to shoot a polar portrait of Dume in Mohawkila. I used to be a hairstylist. We had a life before we came out. Somebody asked me how influential it might be when it comes to this portrait. I said to people, I just want people to look good. I really want people to be fresh. We're going to the Popo Pride. When I read the address, we're connected by photography I was doing photo shoots here in Guatemala. And I thought that she was just a very nice person to be in. The faces and faces series that I'm working on. You have a young generation that is growing up now who doesn't share maybe the same, you know, commonalities like lesbians who were out there in the 90s or late 80s before South Africa gained independence. The young lesbians now, they are socialite connected by the social media and all of that. And they free when it comes to photographs, etc, etc. I know maybe some people get surprised when you start photographing. I was surprised, but at the same time it was fun. I had fun and I didn't know that I'm photogenic. So since then I like to take myself pictures. So this is three years later. We are in the same township. And the township is so popular with gay lives. There are a lot of gay people in Guatemala. And also it has since become notorious for hate crimes because in 2008 a non-bethless bien was brutally murdered here. 2012 was one of the most painful years in our history. We lost a lot of members of our communities. And hate crimes specifically, curative rapes and lesbian murders became one of the brutality that is stained in our brains forever in fear. That happened to bind us. Hate crimes have become a binding factor for the LGBTI communities. We come together to either give support or to confirm that somebody has been killed. Then that person becomes hysteristic. Another case, Namba, becomes part of our history. And what are we doing about it? We always go and attend funerals and then after funerals you go home you wait for another funeral. What? You have to document. You are forced to document. Transformation. I don't really do it. Transformation by Zanela Muhudi. By you. This is your aid. I'm using visuals as a way of creating awareness, capturing the moments, those truths and realities that world will learn about our cultures. I could give you something tangible and say, feel it, this is it. See, you invited to be in that space even though you were not there. Let's put it in and out. We're shooting faces and faces, not fashion. This is not fashion. There is the other side of me when I perform. There is the other side of me when I'm me. How will you engage with me? You look so gay. Actually you look like a drag queen. Most of the time I work with people that I know. They're no strangers to me. I call the people who are in my photographs participants because you partake in a project that will inform many audiences. When it comes to these, there was danger of teaching. Any person who's interested in learning is welcome to learn how to take photographs. I provide cameras as long as a person will be able to document what will then become a contribution to what's in Ganyesu, which is the organization that I formed. One cannot do these major projects alone, which is why I invited people to come on board and work with me. And it means that it's not lonely anymore. Take five. I started this project called Ganyesu to ensure that people who are featured in my photographs get a platform to share their own lives and work. People get to read about sex, people get to read about anything that they will never, in as much as South Africa is so democratic, they'll never see that kind of text in the mainstream media. Most of the team members we are Black Lispians. People occupy different positions within the Ganyesu crew. Bongi is a documenter and Lirato is a graduate, she's a channelist and we just posted a new story on Pep's mare that she wrote this morning. Now I had to beg Lirato to cut their hair and look how beautiful this person is. He did the Rato's portrait in 2010, so we're going to have a nice follow-up shot. I train and I will continue to train with or without funding because if I wait for someone to validate my existence, it will mean that I'm short changing myself. Recently we had to decide whether we buy a fridge where we live or we buy a new lens. So we sleep on the floor, it's nice, documenting with my crew, it's fabulous. I love the people that I work with. A lot of people are writing with Pep's mare thing. For, you know, lesbian or even butch woman. It's something that's like, if I don't know if I can say taboo. But I don't know, you said you need me to revise it. No, you have to talk about it. I don't think that you gave it your all, like how you write when you tackle the issues of hate crimes and other. What would you like to read about in the mainstream? You know, even read, even when seeing, you know, I'd like to see an advert of a family where it's the mother and the mother and the baby, you know, in their fighting gems in the household. It shouldn't only be about the violence and the homophobia. We want to bring about changing spaces that are queerphobic. We still have religious leaders who want to use homosexuality and scapegoat for their own hate. Instead of dealing with poverty, instead of dealing with the corrupted systems that we find ourselves in. And that's what leads to many hate crimes. See where there's white congregate wall? Is where Ntolonokwaza was found. Ntolonokwaza is a victim of hate crime who was brutally murdered. A head was crushed with a big stone, her teeth were all over the place. Ntolonokwaza's children are not the first to be offended by hate crimes. What will people say to the children what happened to their mothers? Ntolonokwaza's case is still outstanding. I don't know how far do they investigate these cases. We all document that Lisbian funeral. Every person who has a cell phone with a camera, it doesn't matter what quality. And all of us come together in one space and download and share. You make that document viral. You want to say to our governments, this is what I'm talking about when I talk of a Lisbian funeral. It's my wish that we could find positive Lisbian icons on Wikipedia as well. Other than to always find brutal murders. You Google black Lisbians in South Africa, you'll see what you see there. There's nothing that focuses on same-sex love versus these hate crimes. When do we start talking about intimacy? I produce pictures that are intimate because I mean intimate being this intimacy that disrupts the perpetrator leads to us being killed. It starts by the same-sex love that is disorganizing the mindset of the homophobe. More education is needed. Mainstream communities need to come on board and help us and ensure that there's no other hate crime. Projecting positivity sometimes can lead to the change. Projecting brutality and violations could lead to further violence. So I think that we need to find the balance in which we project these realities. Nganiso is a group of Pride 2018. I came with Nganiso crew last night. Once we're done here, we're going to put it up on social networks to make sure that people might not be here to understand what is taking place and get their visuals. The whole thing that pink cities are Cape Town, Deben and Johannesburg, people cannot even imagine that there's been proper pride. It's very important for us to say that LGBTI individuals are all over. Any space is possible, so we're here to celebrate with the people of this province. It's about saying I want to be counted in South African history. Claiming my full citizenship, it means that I have to write that part of history. Do you have some work that anybody can do? Since we'll be here. At the Brooklyn Museum Working with Project. But I think it is really important to see her at work. The kind of collaboration she does on so many levels. And she literally is everywhere. She's at Aspen conferences on human rights. She's lecturing, she'll lecture at Smith next week. And still she's back there doing all this incredible documentation with her work. So anyway, I'm hoping that there might be some comments. Thank you very much for your patience. Thank you very much.