SIBANINGI: On Belonging and Being Remembered

By Mpho Molefe

SIBANINGI has left me thinking about what it means to recognise yourself in a history. There is a particular reassurance in encountering lives that make your own feel possible—in knowing that people before you have loved, questioned, built relationships and found ways to live with dignity. For a queer person, that recognition can carry the comfort of discovering that you belong to a story already unfolding.

Curated by Lufuno Ramadwa and produced by the Muholi Art Institute, SIBANINGI marks twenty years of Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases. Its presentation at the Market Photo Workshop, where Muholi studied photography, gives the exhibition a particular resonance. It connects the development of a photographic practice with the relationships and histories that practice has helped preserve.

The title, meaning “we are many”, feels generous in its possibilities. It offers a declaration of collective presence while leaving room to consider who makes up that collective. A shared identity does not give everyone the same experiences. Age, class, geography, gender expression and access to support shape how people move through the world. Belonging becomes more meaningful when it can accommodate those differences, including the parts of one another we may struggle to understand.

That is part of what draws me to the individual lives within Faces and Phases. Rooted in the documentation of Black lesbian and transgender people, the series has grown through Muholi’s continuing relationships with participants, many of whom they have photographed across different stages of their lives. There is care in that willingness to return. It acknowledges that someone continues to change beyond the moment in which we first encountered them.

I find this especially moving because photographs can so easily become fixed accounts of who we are. An image stays still while a life moves forward. We change our minds, our relationships shift, our understanding of ourselves develops. Returning to photograph someone creates space for that movement. It allows a person to remain unfinished, with more of their life still to tell.

The question of how someone wishes to appear also matters. Participants in Faces and Phases choose their posture, setting and dress. Those decisions invite us to consider representation as an encounter involving another person’s agency. For me, this raises questions about the responsibilities of looking: how much do we assume from a face, a body or an item of clothing? How willing are we to let a person complicate the story we have already assigned to them?

Visibility itself carries complexity. Being seen can bring recognition, connection and opportunity. Public exposure can also leave a person vulnerable to scrutiny or unwanted attention. I think this makes care essential to any conversation about representation. People should have a say in how they become visible, and in what parts of themselves they choose to share. There is dignity in being recognised as someone whose boundaries matter.

SIBANINGI also makes me think about remembrance and the limits of what a photograph can hold. A portrait may preserve an expression, but the person extends far beyond it: their humour, contradictions, habits, private worries and the ways they made others feel. Looking at an image can become an invitation to learn more, while accepting that some parts of a life will always remain beyond our knowledge.

For that reason, I am drawn to the possibility of an archive spacious enough to hold ordinary life. A full account of queer existence needs room for affection, pleasure, uncertainty, ambition, disappointment and routine. There is value in recording people living through days that may never become public milestones. These details help future generations imagine their predecessors as people with lives as complicated as their own.

The exhibition’s setting adds another layer to these reflections. At an institution concerned with photographic education, an anniversary can open a conversation about who will have the opportunity to make the next body of work. Preserving a history and supporting those who will continue it are connected responsibilities. Both require time, resources, attention and people willing to do the work beyond the moment of public recognition.

What stays with me is the relationship between belonging and care. For a young queer person encountering these photographs, there may be reassurance in finding evidence of lives that came before their own. For everyone who encounters the work, there is an opportunity to consider how that recognition might extend into everyday relationships.

“We are many” holds an invitation to know one another more carefully. To learn names. To allow for change. To preserve what people entrust to us. To give their lives attention while they are still here to tell us who they are.