Siyabonana – We See One Another
Queer Cinema in South Africa
Alongside Zanele Muholi’s exhibition We Are Here, the film programme SIYABONANA, curated by Kabelo Mofokeng, brings together South African moving-image works that engage with queer lives, histories and self-representation.
Cinema creates a space for looking closely: at people, places, memories, and forms of life that may otherwise remain unseen, overlooked or deliberately erased. This two day program brings together moving image works by South African queer artists and filmmakers that approach this act of looking in different ways. Across documentary, fiction, and experimental film, the works move between personal experience and collective history, intimacy and public life, memory and imagination.
Presented in response to Zanele Muholi's We Are Here at Foto Arsenal Wien, Siyabonana takes its title from the idea of seeing one another. Across Muholi's work, titles such as Somnyama Ngonyama, Faces and Phases, and We Are Here speak to presence, identity, history, and recognition. They insist on the visibility of people and lives that have too often been overlooked, excluded, or made invisible. Siyabonana shifts the emphasis from presence to relation. If We Are Here is a declaration of presence, "we see one another" suggests an encounter: between people, between filmmaker and subject, between image and viewer. It is an invitation to look, listen and learn from one another.
The films span different generations of queer image-making in South Africa. Some return to histories and archives, preserving lives and experiences that have been marginalized or excluded from dominant accounts of the past. Others are concerned with the present: with desire, love, friendship, family, belonging, and the ways queer people imagine and represent themselves. What connects these works for me is not a single way of seeing. Some films document and testify; others reconstruct, perform, or imagine. Some bring us close to their subjects, while others create distance. There are images that reveal and images that withhold. Together, they make space for different ways of encountering queer life, rather than presenting a single story of what it means to be queer in South Africa. The invitation is simply to look closely, and to allow the films to look back. (Kabelo Mofokeng)
In cooperation with Austrian Film Museum
Date: 2.12.2026 at 6 p.m. and 3.12.2026 at 6 p.m.
Location: Austrian Film Museum, Augustinerstraße 1, 1010 Vienna
Cost: 10,50€, membership 5,50€ (for current pricing information please see the website of Austrian Film Museum)
Credits: While You Weren't Looking, 2015, Catherine Stewart