ABSTRACT
Zanele Muholi’s Difficult Love reactivates memory as a way of negotiating the present, to generate a historical consciousness, where the evidence of recording testimony is not necessarily to preserve history for posterity but to “tell their stories to the public, to be listened to, and to be acknowledged”. Her body of work disrupts and challenges. For instance, not only is Difficult Love a “site of memory” or an artefact of memory, wherein individuals recount their traumatic experiences, but a political act as it documents her work in local communities. For example, Muholi takes in groups from her community to view her works, exhibited in museums or art galleries: the gallery becomes a structure of memorialisation wherein her works engage both the individual and the community both separately and mutually in a process of conversation and discourse. But more importantly it serves as a form of political intervention: giving the marginalised a view into a “privileged” space, thereby decolonising it and de-reifying it. Her film, her community engagement projects, and her own photographic works are significant in that they raise social and historical consciousness to examine cultural issues of experience, trauma, memory, the body, sexualit(ies), identity, colonialism, apartheid, heteropatriarchy, and representation. Her works are a unique “politics of perception” and they help render accessible the shattered experiences of postmemory, trauma, lesbianism, apartheid, post/colonialism, and history. Her works are therefore a form of political communication, and examples of disruptive performance and decolonisation.
