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Art, media and gender based activism: A critical reflection on the University of South Africa (UNISA) colloquium on Zanele Muholi

abstract The art work of visual activist Zanele Muholi was the subject of a colloquium held by the University of South Africa (UNISA) on the 24 March 2014. The colloquium invited critical discussion of Muholi's use of film and photography as a medium for black queer gender activism. The event also sought to raise awareness in the public domain of the recurring incidents of homophobic violence and attacks against gender non-conforming people in South Africa and on the rest of the African continent. Presenters offered different ways of seeing and evaluating Muholi's work and its power to deliver a social message by means of a visual discourse that engages and subverts narrow constructions of gender through her representations of the human body and black queer sexual identity. This Focus considers the presentations and the critical value of Muholi's visual activism as a counter discourse on gender and art in post-apartheid South Africa. The writer draws on Paulo Freire's (1970) notion of the liberatory potential of social dialogue and its mediation in the public sphere (Habermas, 1989).