PIC: This homeware collection sold out in three days

Zanele Muholi, internationally acclaimed visual activist, collaborated with Gavin Rajah, a Cape Town-based designer, on a homeware collection inspired by Muholi’s ongoing Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series which sold out in the first week of release.

The collection, which includes cushions, carpets, throws, curtains and candles, are some of the products available for sale to the public on 18 July 2022 that were sold out in the first three days.

Most of the products were purchased in New York, San Francisco, Oslo and Rome where Muholi currently has exhibitions.

The collection is an abstract of the woven prints that Rajah has extrapolated from Muholi’s photographic series.

But the images are not simply reproduced onto products as has been the case for many homeware lines relating to iconic artworks.

The collection is inspired by Muholi’s striking and iconic photographic works which depict the artist as the subject in different guises, summoning her ancestors but also exploiting and subverting fashion and ethnographic photographic tropes relating to Africa.

The Somnyama Ngonyama series was first exhibited in 2015 at the artist’s galleries in South Africa and the US, but has since found audiences around the world from the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the Seattle Art Museum, in the US to the Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong.

Works from this series have also featured in numerous museum survey shows such as at Tate Modern, London, UK (2020-21).

ALSO READ: LA-based company uses recycled dildos to make shoes

The exhibition will tour across Europe at institutions in Paris, Berlin and Umeå in Sweden this year.

“The real power of Muholi’s project, which is a radical act of protest and reclamation, is a deeply personal response … to the colonising and exoticising of the black female body by all those cameras that arrived before,” said Andrea Scott in the New Yorker.

As an image-maker of a different kind and a social activist, Rajah was drawn to Muholi’s practice.

The Somnyama Ngonyama series particularly resonated with his visual sensibility.

His obsession with this series led to him detecting black and white patterns within some of the monochromatic images.

His ambition to translate these latent patterns into woven textiles and create a homeware collection immediately chimed with Muholi.

“Gavin had seen something in my images that I hadn’t thought of and he is not compromising the original works,” said Muholi.

Since creating a line of T-shirts to coincide with the early series of portraits of black lesbians in South Africa – Faces and Phases – Muholi has been keen to find ways for their works to extend “into the world in which I live.”

Rajah has extracted the essence of Muholi’s aesthetic in the the woven fabrics, largely from recycled fibres, and they are are visually united – all black and white – and bear an African imprint, though they are not “geographically defined”, he added.

NOW READ: Inside Miss SA 2022’s R10.5 million penthouse apartment