What Happens When an Archive Travels? Zanele Muholi’s We Are Here at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN

By Mpho Molefe

There is a particular energy that gathers around an exhibition before the room has settled into the quieter rhythm of looking. On the opening night of We Are Here | Zanele Muholi at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, people moved between photographs, conversations and introductions, pausing before familiar faces and unfamiliar ones. Some arrived knowing Muholi’s work intimately. Others were encountering it for the first time.

For an exhibition concerned so deeply with visibility, the people standing inside the galleries became part of the encounter.

Curated by Marit Lena Herrmann, We Are Here marks Muholi’s first solo exhibition in Austria, bringing together more than two decades of photographic practice. The exhibition moves through portraits, self-portraits, documentary work, video and archival material, tracing a practice that has consistently placed Black queer lives at the centre of its own visual language.

The scale matters. So does the movement through the exhibition. Muholi’s work has never belonged comfortably to a single category. There is documentary photography, portraiture, activism, performance, self-fashioning and an ongoing engagement with the politics of looking. In Vienna, these different strands occupy the same institutional space, allowing visitors to move between intimate encounters and a much larger history.

Christine, an architect and photographer, had encountered Muholi’s work before, including in Venice several years ago. Even with that familiarity, seeing the work together again made its range more apparent.

“The first part, you see the more journalistic aspects of her work,” she says. “And then the second part, what I like most are her pictures of herself.”

It is the self-portraits that stay with her most strongly. She describes them as “very special” and “very strong”, words she returns to almost instinctively when trying to explain their effect.

Christine’s response is revealing because she is looking at the exhibition through the eyes of someone who also makes images. She notices the shifts in photographic language, the difference between recording the lives of others and constructing an image of oneself. Muholi’s self-portraiture complicates the photographer's position as an observer. The camera turns inward, but the resulting images remain deeply engaged with questions of race, gender, power, labour, history and the gaze.

Asked to describe the exhibition in three words, Christine laughs at the difficulty of the exercise before offering two: “Expressive” and “strong.”

The hesitation is perhaps more telling than a polished answer could have been. Muholi’s practice resists easy compression.

For Tezi, that resistance initially produced a different feeling. Standing outside the exhibition, there was some anxiety about the size of the space and how representation would register inside it. That changed after entering.

“I saw the pictures, I saw the art, and I felt right at home,” Tezi says.

They began to notice the people around them, particularly other BIPOC visitors. The room became less unfamiliar. They spoke to people, looked closely at the photographs and found themselves thinking about their own practice as someone interested in depicting events.

There was a sense of recognition, but also motivation. Muholi’s images offered Tezi another way of thinking about photography and what it can hold.

“It’s important to have shows like this ’cause there’s not enough representation,” they say. “We need to see this a lot more.”

That sense of recognition surfaces repeatedly throughout the evening, although it takes different forms.

For Amina, an artist, the exhibition becomes a social space almost as much as a photographic one. There are many people in the galleries, but she does not experience the crowd as incidental to the exhibition. She sees the way Muholi’s work creates a place for people to gather.

For her, the words that come closest are “love, community, and care.”

It is a reading that sits close to the foundations of Muholi’s practice. Faces and Phases, the ongoing portrait archive begun in 2006, has grown through sustained relationships with Black lesbian, transgender and queer communities across South Africa and beyond. The photographs function as portraits, records and acts of preservation. They also carry the histories of the relationships through which they were made.

John Marshall approaches the exhibition from a different position. He has lived in Vienna for decades, worked for the United Nations, and spent around 25 years at Weltmuseum Wien. He already knew Muholi’s work and had encountered the photographs through books and auction catalogues.

What surprises him in the exhibition is the sheer number of faces.

He speaks about the feeling contained in the portraits, carefully acknowledging that the people depicted cannot all be assumed to share the same identity. His attention is on the photographic encounter itself, on the ability of a portrait to reach beyond the circumstances in which it was made.

“I’ve seen a hundred books about portraits,” he says, “and I’m really, really amazed at how she makes portrait photography touch people.”

Then he simplifies it further.

“It touches you.”

That phrase is worth lingering over because touch is not a metaphor that belongs comfortably to photography. A photograph is physically distant from the person it depicts. The subject is fixed within a frame, separated from the viewer by time, space and the material surface of the image. Yet Muholi’s portraits repeatedly produce a sense of proximity.

The effect is especially pronounced in Faces and Phases, where the accumulation of individual portraits becomes significant. One face leads to another. One life sits beside another. The archive grows through difference, repetition and return.

Jamila Costely has encountered Muholi’s work several times before, but she describes the Vienna exhibition as a “very special time.”

What matters to her is who she sees represented in the room and within the photographs: Black lesbian, fat, queer and trans people.

She describes feeling “overwhelmed and empowered” by the beauty of the people depicted and by the experience of seeing those lives given sustained attention within a major European institution.

There is also a political dimension to her response. She speaks about the interconnectedness of struggles against queer hatred, recognising that the histories represented in Muholi’s work do not exist in isolation from one another.

Her words complicate the idea that representation can be measured simply by whether someone sees themselves in a picture. Representation can also create a connection between experiences, places and histories that may otherwise be kept apart.

Jeanne Pascale Landela, a Cameroonian artist based in Vienna who works across painting, makeup and research, describes the experience in more physical terms.

The exhibition, she says, made her feel “held”.

Then she repeats it: “beautifully held by the space.”

It is an unexpectedly tactile description of an exhibition. Yet it echoes John’s sense that Muholi’s portraits can touch the viewer. Here, the photographs are not being described as distant objects for contemplation. The space itself has become part of the emotional experience.

Jeanne speaks about the gratitude of living in a time when queer life can be documented and expressed in this way. She calls the exhibition “grounding and expansive”, two words that seem contradictory until considered spatially. The work gives a person somewhere to stand while simultaneously opening outward onto lives, histories and experiences beyond their own.

For Sidi, who is nineteen and studying law in Vienna, the encounter is immediate.

She describes feeling “proud and beautiful and represented”.

She notices the people around her too, and the beauty she sees in them becomes part of her experience of the exhibition. When asked to describe the work, she reaches for “beautiful”, then “deep”, because of the emotional connection she feels as a queer Black person, and finally “real”.

The word “real” is important.

Muholi’s work has often been described through the language of activism, but Sidi calls the practice “visual activism”, a phrase that captures something central to the exhibition. The photographs are not detached illustrations of a political argument. They are made through encounters with people, through relationships and through the decision to make certain lives visible on their own terms.

That question of historical visibility becomes particularly important for Suzy, a twenty-three-year-old architecture student in Vienna.

She has followed Muholi’s work for around three years, collecting postcards and reading about the photographer without ever having seen one of her exhibitions in person.

Walking through We Are Here was, therefore, a long-awaited encounter.

“I felt really connected to her,” Suzy says. “I finally got to see her work and more than just her self-portraits.”

Her response is shaped as much by what she learns as by what she sees. She describes the exhibition as “deep”, but speaks equally about its educational dimension. The work, she says, contains pain while also giving viewers a way to understand why Muholi makes it and to learn more about LGBTQIA+ histories in Africa and South Africa.

One of the statements Suzy encountered in the exhibition stayed with her in particular: the assertion that LGBTQIA+ identities are not something imported into Africa through colonialism, but have histories on the continent that predate colonial rule.

“It’s really important for people to remember that and never to forget that,” she says.

Her response points towards something that can be easy to overlook when discussing Muholi primarily through the emotional force of the images. The exhibition also asks visitors to reconsider the historical frameworks through which queer African lives have been represented and understood.

The photographs carry those questions differently. Some are intimate. Some are confrontational. Some are deliberately theatrical. Others hold the quiet concentration of a person looking directly into the camera.

And then there is the sheer volume of them.

Pauline Marcel, an artist living in Vienna and originally from Dominica in the Caribbean, had seen Muholi’s work at art fairs in South Africa and, more recently, in London. Yet encountering the exhibition in person produced a different physical response.

“It was a lot,” she says.

There is a moment in her description when language seems to fail her. She tries to explain the sensation of moving through the galleries, wondering whether she was “in midair”, “floating”, “moving”, or perhaps feeling “a little bit ghostly”.

It is one of the most useful responses to the exhibition because it refuses to resolve the experience too quickly.

There is so much work that it requires time. Pauline speaks about needing to consume it, but also to enjoy it. The exhibition offers a “whole spectrum” of Muholi’s practice, and that spectrum is not necessarily something that can be absorbed in one visit.

Her response introduces a different kind of truth into the room. An archive of this scale can overwhelm as easily as it can affirm. The abundance of faces, bodies and histories demands attention. It asks the viewer to keep looking.

That density is particularly significant when considered alongside Faces and Phases. The project has expanded over two decades, and its strength comes partly from accumulation. There is no single portrait that can stand in for the whole. The archive depends on plurality.

This is also where the exhibition’s title begins to resonate differently.

We Are Here is a statement of presence, but it is not a single declaration spoken by a single subject. The “we” expands across the exhibition: the people photographed, the photographer, the communities within which the work has been made, the histories being preserved, and the viewers entering the galleries.

On opening night in Vienna, that “we” became visible in another way.

It was in Tezi’s feeling of arriving somewhere familiar. In Amina’s recognition of community and care. In Jeanne’s description of being held. In John’s response to the emotional force of portraiture. In Jamila’s attention to Black queer, trans and fat representation. In Sidi’s sense of pride, beauty and reality. In Suzy’s recognition of the historical importance of the work. And in Pauline’s uncertainty about how to contain an exhibition that seemed, at times, to exceed the physical space around her.

These responses do not produce a single interpretation of Muholi’s work. They do something more interesting.

They demonstrate how differently a photograph can be encountered depending on who is standing in front of it.

For some visitors, the work offers recognition. For others, it offers historical knowledge. Some respond to the formal force of the image, others to the community embedded within its making. Some find themselves at home. Others feel overwhelmed by the scale of what is being asked of them.

None of these responses cancels out the others.

That may be one of the exhibition’s most compelling qualities. Muholi’s photographs have travelled extensively, but they do not arrive in every place carrying a fixed meaning. They enter new rooms and encounter new publics. In Vienna, the work meets people who bring their own histories of migration, queerness, race, photography, architecture, art, activism and belonging into the act of looking.

The photographs remain the photographs.

The encounter changes.

And perhaps that is why so many of the visitors struggled to reduce the exhibition to three words. “Expressive.” “Strong.” “Grounding.” “Expansive.” “Mesmerising.” “Fabulous.” “Embracing.” “Beautiful.” “Deep.” “Real.”

The vocabulary keeps multiplying because the work itself does.

We Are Here is an exhibition about visibility, but visibility is never passive. To be seen is to enter a field of attention. To photograph someone is to decide what deserves to be remembered, how a person will be encountered, and who might one day stand before their image.

Muholi has spent decades making those decisions with and through communities that have too often been photographed by others, spoken for by others, or excluded from the visual record altogether.

In Vienna, those photographs now occupy the walls of a major photographic institution. People walk through them, talk beside them, recognise themselves in them, question them, learn from them and sometimes struggle to find words for what they are experiencing.

The work does not require everyone to feel the same thing.

It asks them to look.

And, for a while, to remain with what they see.