南アフリカ共和国を拠点とするアーティスト、活動家であるザネレ・ムホリ（Zanele Muholi）の作品集。現代で最も力強いビジュアル・アクティビストの一人である作者が手がけた本書には、90点以上のセルフ・ポートレイトが収められている。

キュレーター、詩人、作家陣による20以上の寄稿文と、美しいトライトーンで仕上げられた作品群は、自伝的であり芸術的なステートメントであると同時に、アイデンティティ、人種、歴史に対する抵抗のマニフェストである。

“These feel like images you might have dreamed, both of the kind that slip away and the ones you manage to keep tenuously in your grasp, slippery, otherworldly. . . . Before our eyes, Zanele Muholi transforms into a mother, a domestic worker, an Afrofuturist, an oracle. It’s fiction and it is not.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is the long-awaited monograph from one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. The book features over ninety of Muholi’s evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi’s immediate environment. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholi’s radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms. As Muholi states, “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholi’s images, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.