How can a traveling exhibition create new opportunities for audience engagement? “When people think of a museum they think of big structures that are hard for one to access,” says South African photographer Zanele Muholi. “It’s like there is a group of people who are supposedly the right individuals to enter those spaces.” Muholi discussed how their Women’s Mobile Museum, created for the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, considers issues of museum accessibility, affordability, and mobility by presenting exhibitions in community spaces and in collaboration with local residents.
Hear more from Muholi on what it means to be a visual activist.
Zanele Muholi is an award-winning visual activist and photographer who explores race, gender, and sexuality. Muholi’s work has been exhibited at Documenta 13, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. Their work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and more. Their first major US-based project and culmination of an 18-month-long artist residency with the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center featured the work of ten Philadelphia women in the Center-supported Women’s Mobile Museum.
