To refresh my mind after the long break, and get my thoughts back on track, I went to Switzerland. In the Helmhaus in Zürich's city centre, I visited a carefully conceived and curated exhibition called
Welt - Bilder 5.
Welt - Bilder (World Images) is an ongoing exhibition series which asks and answers questions about the way people live, move and conform in different parts of the world and cultures. This year, it featured artists such as Bieke Depoorter, Naoya Hatakeyama and Tobias Zielony.
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| The poster, featuring an image from Zielony's Trona series |
My favourite part has to be - easy to tell regarding the content of this blog and
this earlier blog post - Zanele Muholi's
Faces and Phases. It includes simple portraits of queer South Africans, each completed with a name and place. I described this series as powerful and poignant back when I had seen it on the internet. I dare say that Muholi's images work even better in print.
Muholi's work had a room for itself in the spacious Helmhaus, well lit and without windows or noises, making it possible to immerse into the pictures and get caught up in them without distraction. The portraits are hung on eye height, and because Muholi's subjects looked right into the camera, it feels, when looking at the prints, as if the people are staring right back at you. The faces are printed close to lifesize, and when I looked at one of them, I felt a downright conversation between me and the person taking place.
The
Welt - Bilder 5 hand-out describes the work as "scintillating diversity (...) These images of the lesbian, transgender and gay scene bear witness to a healthy sense of self on a continent where traditional gender roles are strongly upheld". Having been transported thousands of miles to the slightly less conservative Switzerland and a mainly white audience, the images, in the way they were displayed, are still strong and proud ambassadors. They question prejudice, fear, invisibility, and they do it in the most direct way possible except for the people actually speaking to you in person.
I am really happy I managed to see
Faces and Phases exhibited this way, and hope that the prints become available to an even larger audience in the future. The series is also included in the book
Welt - Bilder 5, accompanied by background information texts. The book is published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg.
