Zinhle Ka Nobuhlalusa

Born December 1993 in Johannesburg, Zinhle ka'Nobuhlaluse (legally Manzini), is a self-taught mixed medium artist. She is currently located in Pennsylvania (United States), pursuing a dual-title PhD in Philosophy & Women, Gender and Sexuality studies. Her areas of focus are Black existentialism, Feminist Philosophy, and Critical Philosophy of Race. Zinhle is also a certified 200hr Yoga Teacher. 

Her artwork assembles her scholarly interest and yoga; it centres on the naked Black female flesh. Zinhle plays with the representations of Blackwomen's self and societal identities at the intersections of resistance and violence. In her work, she offers parts of herself created from a place of memory, illusion, and feminist joy. 

This debut collection is an aesthetic representation of her body and other Blackwomen who have made their naked bodies available to the public eye. The collection plays with pencil, charcoal, paint, and texture to trouble the naked body as dainty, sexual, vulnerable, and recognises the monstrosity that is Blackwomenhood. The re-representation of the public images seeks to express how Blackwomens naked bodies no matter the form, are, have, and always-already bare the potential to be "pornotroped" as we are reminded by the African American literary critic and Feminist scholar Hortense J. Spillers in her icononic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987). At the same time, Blackwomen have always resisted this potentiality and have used their bodies as a resistant modality. Three of the works' titles ("Fearing Feminists”, "Foreign Familiars", and "Femicidal Intimacy") are chapters of the South African literary critic and Feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola's forthcoming book Female Fear Factory (2021). These images speak to this feminist resistance as we see in "Fearing Feminist", a (re)memory of the Activist and Feminist scholar Simamkele Dlakavu in protest solidarity with the 2016 #RUReferencelist protestors.