Women's Mobile Museum at UJ
Black Joy and Self Care Symposium
17 September 2022
11:30 AM – 3:00 PM
Enoch Sontonga Center (PLEASE NOTE VENUE CHANGE)
UJ Soweto Campus
RSVP by 14 September 2022 to sineadf@uj.ac.za
The Women's Mobile Museum in partnership with the University of Johannesburg, Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), The Museum of Black Joy, and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image present the Black Joy and Self Care Symposium and exhibition at the UJ Soweto campus from the 9th of September to the 2nd of October 2022.
All are welcome to attend the Black Joy and Self Care Symposium on Saturday 17 September 2022. Women and girls will gather to affirm that our joy is our common ground. Andrea Walls, founder of The Museum of Black Joy, writes, “To move from trauma to triumph is intentional work.” The Black Joy and Self Care Symposium promises a joyful agenda of idea sharing, games, poetry, and song. All are welcome. Speak JOY to power.
Registration via RSVP is required to attend the symposium.
The Women’s Mobile Museum is conceived by Zanele Muholi and created with Lori Waselchuk and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image. The Women’s Mobile Museum is a vehicle in the metaphorical sense–it is both a manifesto and a delivery system for reclaiming the space and function of presenting art. It aims to challenge the current hierarchies of the art world and, more broadly, of the intellectual world. Compelling imagery asks us to question the gaze, housing, urban social infrastructure, memory, racism, and even what it means to make a photographic portrait. The artists of the Women’s Mobile Museum envision a decolonized art museum that welcomes all people. The Women's Mobile Museum is a multi-media exhibition featuring 11 artists from South Africa and Philadelphia PA (USA) and will be on view at the UJ FADA Atrium, Bunting Road Campus, from 16 to 28 September 2022.
Women’s Mobile Museum (hosted at FADA Building, Bunting Road campus) and Black Joy and Self Care (hosted at Enoch Sontonga center, Soweto campus) are curated by Lori Waselchuk and presented by the University of Johannesburg, Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), The Museum of Black Joy, and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image. Lead support is provided by the William Penn Foundation.
Installation Images
Artists
Muholi is a South African visual activist and photographer. For over a decade they have documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community, in 2006 Muholi embarked on an ongoing project, Faces and Phases, in which they depict black lesbian and transgender individuals. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is "to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond." These arresting portraits are part of Muholi’s contribution towards a more democratic and representative South African homosexual history. Through this positive imagery, Muholi hopes to offset the stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.
In a more recent ongoing series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi becomes both the participant and the image-maker, as they turn the camera on themself. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, Muholi’s self portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history. Through exaggerating the darkness of her skin tone, Muholi reclaims their blackness, and offsets the culturally dominant images of black women in the media today.
Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban and lives in Johannesburg. They studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. Muholi has won numerous awards including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Africa'Sout! Courage and Creativity Award (2016); the Outstanding International Alumni Award from Ryerson University (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; and a Prince Claus Award (2013), among others. Muholi’s work has been exhibited at Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; and the 29th São Paulo Biennale.
Solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Autograph ABP, London: the Mead Art Museum, Amherst; Gallatin Galleries, New York; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo; Einsteinhaus, Ulm; Schwules Museum, Berlin; and Casa Africa, Las Palmas. Muholi's work is included in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and others.
Muholi was shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their publication Faces and Phases 2006-14 (Steidl/The Walther Collection). Other publications include Zanele Muholi: African Women Photographers #1 (Casa Africa and La Fábrica, 2011); Faces and Phases (Prestel, 2010); and Only half the picture (Stevenson, 2006). Muholi is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
Lindeka Qampi made photography as her career in 2006, after joining a consortium of photographers known as Iliso Labantu (the eye of the people). For the past decade she has focused her lens on daily township life, with particular attention on Khayelitsha, the township in which she has lived since her teens. She captures and shares what she sees, from the private sphere to the euphoria of child play. Her photographs express the poetry and politics of the ‘ordinary act’ and therein the potential of imagining new possibilities for the future.
Afaq (Fofo) Mahmoud is a Philly based daughter, with grandmother tendencies. Assembled in Yemen (from Sudanese parts), Afaq considers herself a global citizen of her own country. She is an artist, activist, and educator who seeks to love the world until it loves her back.
Carrieanne Shimborski is a Philadelphia native, abstract painter, Master doodler, and an emerging photographer. Inspired by the loss of her brother to a herion overdose in 2015, Carrie Anne focuses on the "forgotten in Philadelphia" with special attention given to those suffering from addiction and to the city's homeless. Throughout her work, Carrie Anne seeks to capture the "raw, real, and present emotion" of the individual so that they can remember what they were going through at that very moment in their life. As a self-taught artist, Carrie Anne has created numerous pieces of artwork, however, one of her greatest creations thus far, is the light of her life, Luca!
Black, queer, and fearless; Davelle Barnes is a meme curator, a film ethnographer, a social poet and a dapper rapper. The multidisciplinary teaching artist is a Women’s Mobile Museum Project Apprentice at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, a UPENN CAMRA Fellow, a Philly-CAM Digital Media Literacy Fellow and a Warrior Writer. Drawing from her intersecting identities and lived experience, the former Army Sergeant is quickly becoming a veteran media maker. Race, class, gender inequality, homophobia and war are reoccurring themes of her work. Her writing has appeared on forHarriet.com, Afro Punk, Elixher Magazine and Quntfront. Her short film, “A Collage of Masculinity” recently screened at Our Queer Arts Festival and will be part of this year’s, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) Film Festival.
Danielle Morris is a street photographer with an interest in fine art and an interest in combining the two. She was an assistant teacher of photography at the Village of Arts and Humanities. Her artistic style is inspired by Roy Decavara and Shawn Theodore. She is a psychologically driven artist with intentions of fostering the embodiment of power, confidences, self love, and spirituality through the exploration, acceptance, and love of blackness and identity within blackness. Influenced by a family of ameteur photographers, she is a hoarder of memories and determined to capture life as beautifully and truthfully as she sees it. A black woman evolving from her current state of black womanhood; an existence riddled with stigma and met with aggression on two planes on a sharing stories and telling her own.
Iris Maldonado grew up in Fajardo, Puerto Rico but graduated at Thomas A. Edison High School in Philadelphia. She is a single mother and a grandmother of 3 beautiful children who she loves so much. Iris has an associate’s degree in Human Service. Her passion for helping people motivates her work as a peer support coach. She helps her members be the best that they can be and not let their limitations separate them from their goals. Iris is very responsible and feels that her accomplishments are the result of hard work, dedication, commitment, and ambition. Iris never gives up on what she feels is important. Photography is Iris’ tool for self-expression, and it validates her voice. Her photographs come, as she likes to say, “from the eyes of their soul.”
Latasha Billington is a Philadelphia native who uses art as a way to heal, motivate and give back to underserved communities. Latasha specializes in visual art, spoken word and engaging with community members. She is best known for assisting on large-scale public mural projects. She can often be seen operating boom lifts or maintaining a smooth flow curing community paint days. Latasha is currently working with Philadelphia Mural Arts, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Amber Art and Design. Her motto is to enlighten, inspire and elevate.
Shana-Adina Roberts is an artist from West Philadelphia. She is a multi-disciplined artist who continuously explores and discovers new ways to express herself. Her work moves from the figurative to the avant-garde. For Shana, creating is naturally who she is, and has always been. Her anxiety and paranoia influences her work. She is an artist who is interested in creating art that speaks to her experience and can speak for her.
Andrea “Philly” Walls is a conceptual artist with an interdisciplinary practice, informed and inspired by the writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. She is pleased that her writing, scholarship, and visual art have been supported by organizations she admires, including the Leeway Foundation, Black Public Media/MIT Open Documentary Lab; VONA/Voices Workshops for Writers of Color; Hedgebrook Residencies for Women Authoring Change; The Colored Girls Museum; Writers Room at Drexel University; The Studio Museum of Harlem; The Women’s Mobile Museum, Barnes Museum West and Shea Moisture/Good Mirrors Emerging Visionary Fund. In addition to founding and curating The Museum of Black Joy, she is the creator and curator of The D’Archive.com, author of the poetry chapbook, Ultraviolet Catastrophe (Thread Makes Blanket Press) and the digital web-collection, The Black Body Curve. She lives and creates in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia native, Muffy Ashley Torres is an ever-learning artist through the support of her community. With a diagnosis of a chronic illness at a young age, she “found in art a way to navigate and deal with the physical pain I often endure. Through photography and illustration, I embrace the light, silly, and colorful in order to escape and combat the wicked forces in power.”
Women’s Mobile Museum Podcast
Images from the opening
