Following their lauded 2018 monograph, South African artist and activist Zanele Muholi has released a second book collecting the most recent additions to their series Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness. Volume II features 80 self-portraits shot in Muholi’s signature saturated black and white along with writings by ten contributors and a long-form interview.

Often adorned in objects like cameras or aluminum can tops that are common to the locations they visit, the artist centers themself in each image and returns the gaze to the viewer, a radical act as a Black queer person. “My practice as a visual activist looks at Black resistance—existence as well as insistence,” they said about the series.

Edited by Renée Mussai and published by Aperture, Volume II reflects on how Muholi’s portraits subvert art historical traditions and respond to the current moment. The book largely contains works taken after the onset of COVID-19, and therefore, many portraits incorporate essential goods like masks and water jugs. Capturing a particularly traumatic time, the photos are a striking and poignant reminder that the human body is vulnerable and worth safeguarding.

Ideas about protection arise frequently, as in works like “Baveziwe I,” which means “exposed to” in Zulu and portrays them swathed in thick fabric, just their face visible. “Taking charge of my representation is one way of dealing with the inevitability of exposure. You think you are covered, but you are not. We are always exposed,” Muholi says in the book. The series “is my way of creating and activating a space of photographic shelter, a personal archive.”

Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness: Volume II is available on Bookshop.

“Baveziwe I” (2021)

“Thathu I” (2019)

“Mihla IV” (2020)

“Aphelile IV” (2020)

Cover image: “Qiniso” (2019)

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Greenery abounds in the large-scale murals of Italian artist ONIRO, who often focuses on themes of interconnectedness and balance, especially between humans and the natural world. In “Coltivazione del Sé,” or “self-cultivation,” a human form emerges from the leaves and shadows of a burgeoning plant, while an opening of sky between branches reveals a facial silhouette in an untitled mural on an olive oil processing workshop.

In 2022, ONIRO completed an ambitious series that links three neighboring communities along the Via Aurelia, an ancient Roman artery in Italy constructed around 241 B.C.E. that remains a busy commercial thoroughfare today. “Each mural is a necessary part for the others, like organs that form an organism, and which as a whole has a greater value than the sum of the individual parts,” the artist says.

The three pieces in Organismo, or “body,” are composed in a loose, painterly style to depict Gaia—the ancient Greek goddess who personified the earth—an island shaped like the human heart, and a peninsula shaped like lungs with flowing, bronchial inlets. Explore more on Behance and Instagram.

Untitled, La Marina oil mill, San Donato Val Comino, Italy (2021)

“Organismo – Cuore” (2022), Comune di Castagneto Carducci, Italy

“Coltivazione del Sé”

Detail of “Coltivazione del Sé”

“Organismo – Polmoni” (2022), Comune di San Vincenzo, Italy

Aerial view of “Organismo – Polmoni.” Photo by Francesco Luongo

“Organismo – Gaia” (2022), Comune di Venturina Terme, Italy

“Casa del Fiume”

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