Jacana

Contributors to TRANS: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa and representatives of Gender DynamiX, a Human Rights organisation promoting freedom of expression of gender identity, with a focus on transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming identities, have added their voices to poets, Yvette Christiansë and Gabeba Baderoon, in expressing their concern at Minister Lulu Xingwana’s reaction towards lesbian photographer, Zanele Muholi’s work.

Special to the Jacana Media blog, Robert Hamblin and Caroline Bowley speak on this topic with passion and conviction:

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Gender DynamiX is deeply concerned about the policing of bodies by the State. A very large part of our work is centred on examining the practices of the Department of Health (DoH) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and their unethical activities towards Transgender people. We are now faced with the question whether this is becoming a government trend.

Has the Department of Arts and Culture now joined hands with the DoH and the DHA in their discriminatory practices towards gender variant bodies? Minister Xingwana’s recent behaviour regarding the work of gender activist artist Zanele Muholi adds to the gravity of what seems to be a growing conservative trend in state departments.

“Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building,” said Lulu Xingwana, the Minister of Arts and Culture about Muholi’s work. “Immoral and offensive” speaks to the old “art vs. porn” debate, as well as to peoples’ personal opinions. The point of advocacy art is not aesthetics. It is to educate, to stimulate debate, to object to it if you wish, and to give people a platform from which to voice opinions. When Xingwana publically gives an opinion, she’s doing it on behalf of us all. She is a government minister and so in condemning it outright in essence, she claims that of the entire nation echoes her opinion. It most certainly doesn’t, as recent reactions in the City Press, the Times etc. clearly show.

“Nation building,” according to our very fine constitution, includes lesbians, transgender, gender non-conforming people, and so on – and it certainly includes artists. The constitution even has room for reactionary and conservative opinions like Xingwana’s – but not as our national representative of arts and culture in this country and worldwide.

Zanele Muholi is the kind of artist you would never have experienced in the bad old days of apartheid. She’s black, she’s a lesbian, and she has very clear messages for her community – for us. Her photography tells truths many people don’t enjoy – that there are black lesbians and gender variant people in South Africa. Her work also tells us that we are allowing the ongoing rape of black lesbians in order to “cure” them and all too often, their murders. Zanele Muholi is a symbol of the inclusiveness of the constitution.

Xingwana has publicly and officially expressed her personal negative feelings about gender variant peoples’ bodies and how they should interact. The figures in Muholi’s work are clearly not engaged in sexual activity. We interpret it as the minister’s policing of bodies and the behaviour of those bodies.

There are disturbing parallels between this and the way the Department of Health discriminates against gender variant bodies, noting that discrimination is taking place in the form of exclusion / gate keeping for treatment at most government hospitals. At the Department of Home Affairs there is a clear trend where the Department is not implementing the Amendment of Act 49 of 2003. Act 49 explicitly allows trans and intersex people to amend their documentation without requiring genital surgery. This law was amended partly because of the lack of access to, and gate keeping at State Hospitals.

Gender DynamiX would like to see government officials and especially Xingwana embrace our diversity, and make a concerted effort to sensitise themselves to gender variance, to educate themselves about art activism, and to acknowledge that gender variant people too are part of the rainbow nation that we are building!

In addition, Gender DynamiX demands public acknowledgement by the Government Ministers concerned, of the vulnerability of our constituency, and of the ongoing prejudices lesbians, gays, transgender and intersex people, artists and many other marginalised groups are facing on a daily basis.

Book details

• TRANS: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa edited by Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais, Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved
  EAN: 9781920196226
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The Johannesburg Art Gallery opened the Thami Mnyele and Medu Art Ensemble exhibition in the last months of 2008 under the curatorship of the gallery’s Director, Clive Kellner. Jacana is proud to present Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective, a book which brings together the myriad artworks exhibited and the stories of the original members of Medu who created them in a generously illustrated work.

In the aftermath of the Soweto uprisings an association of exiled artists was formed in Botswana where its members felt safe to practice their craft out of reach of the apartheid government in a time when violent military action was the order of the day in South Africa. The group of artists, who preferred to call themselves “cultural workers” due to the political framework of their creative skills, became known as Medu, the Sepedi word for “roots”.

The retrospective not only focuses on this group that perished violently 23 years earlier, but also relates the story of Medu’a particular cultural struggle from exile. Thamsanqa ‘Thami” Mnyele featured at the centre of the exhibition. His talent as an artist and his political activism were fundamental to consolidating Medu’s political and cultural profile. The exhibition follows Thami’s intellectual and creative development as an artist, through his images and texts which mirrored the plight but also the dreams and aspirations of South Africa’s disenfranchised.

The exhibition and book document a particular chapter in South Africa’s struggle for democracy by telling the story of artist and activist Thami Mnyele and a group of cultural workers in exile in Botswana called Medu Art Ensemble. This is the first time that their history is being told.

About the author

Clive Kellner is the Director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Curator of the Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Enseble Retrospective Exhibition, hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery from 30 November 2008 to 31 March 2009

Book details

• Thami Mnyele & Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective edited by Clive Kellner
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770096882
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Sue Williamson’s South African Art Now, or “The Book” as art insiders refer to it, is at the centre of her recent chat with Janine Stephen:

SUE Williamson is generally quite the diplomat, but she’s no great fan of Jean Pigozzi — an Italian man who owns a huge private collection of contemporary African art, which he pimps out to the museums of the west.

There is a photo of him in a 2005 edition of Vanity Fair, standing loud-shirted amid a collection of “his” artists (including Esther Mahlangu and Chéri Samba). He has chosen them according to three criteria: they “must be black, breathing and living in Africa”.

Williamson — who, with the publication of South African Art Now, has three respected books under her belt — is infuriated that Pigozzi’s uneven collection has managed to shape popular US perceptions of African contemporary art: he evidently seldom considers work by fine art-trained artists, so traditional materials predominate in his collection.

Thanks to the influence of glossy books on the Pigozzi works (one, funnily enough, titled African Art Now) and prestigious shows at institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, the American public doesn’t expect “sophisticated video installations” to come out of Africa, says Williamson.

• Read the complete article in The Weekender

Book details

• South African Art Now by Sue Williamson
  EAN: 9781770097216
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