Zandile Tshabalala is a visual artist born in Soweto, South Africa. She is well known for her artworks that revisit the representation of Black women throughout art history.
Beautiful Experiment(s) is her first European solo exhibition, that is hosted by Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin. Tshabalala was inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s seminal work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Hartman’s work tells about Black women’s lives in the aftermath of the official end of slavery in the US. Like Hartman who used a meta-fictional approach, Tshabalala rediscovers the image of Black women in Post-Apartheid South Africa as pioneers of sexual and LGBTQ+ movements.
Zandile Tshabalala, Lounging l: G fabulous, 2021, courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich. Photos by Simon Vogel. https://nagel-draxler.de/
Tshabalala simultaneously embraces and rejects clichés around the representation of Black women, to overturn eroticism and exoticism of colonial gaze on the Black female body. In colonialism, Black women’s bodies were treated as an object of voyeurism. In contrast, Tshabalala makes a “moral judo reversal where the voyeur is not the audience but the voyeur is the sitter, the subject of her portraits”. For example, in Lounging l: G fabulous, she portrays a Black woman’s silhouette who poses more seductive and bold compared with Manet’s Olympia. The shell-like object in the background reminds us of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, a symbol of the purity and beauty of woman.
Zandile Tshabalala, “Masking”, 2021, courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich. Photos by Simon Vogel, https://nagel-draxler.de/
Tshabalala’s paintings are incredible and pivotal to turn the clichés colonial representation of Black women into free and autonomous subjects. Beautiful Experiment(s) is on view at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin through June 26, 2021.