Zanele Muholi's powerful portraits are captivating crowds at Venice Biennale

Zanele Muholi's Joburg exhibition at Stevenson art gallery is concurrent to her inclusion in the 58th Venice Biennale.

Entitled May You Live in Interesting Times, the international exhibition includes 79 artists from across the globe - each holding a space that's often deeply physical, provocative and emotive.

Curated by Ralph Rugoff from London's Hayward gallery, the Venice show aims, according to Rugoff: "To embrace a general view of art's social function as encompassing both pleasure and critical thinking."

Much is made of the fact that half the contributing artists are female, and subjects range from emigration to climate change to gender and race politics.

Viewers are challenged to reflect on the state of the world, for example through French artist Neil Beloufa's Global Agreement installation - a series of sculptures including Skype videos he conducted with strangers, ex-service men and women who reveal their views on love, life, power and identity.

The effect is startling. On one side of the screen viewers are physically uncomfortable, on the other hiding behind a digital anonymity, opinions are broad and held with conviction. One interviewee looks askance as he says through static: "We only get the love we deserve."

Equally arresting is Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan's poignant tribute to the first (ignored) African-American astronaut, Robert Henry Lawrence. A holograph and neon sculpture sit alongside an installation that goes beep each time a satellite passes over Italy.

This small spacecraft was launched in conjunction with SpaceX and contains a gold urn in Lawrence's honour. It orbits the earth 15 times a day.

But, according to Strachan, not all were impressed by Lawrence. In a deeply racial '60s America his mother received hurtful hate mail. One such postcard said if her son died, "there would be no coons on the moon".

Throughout the Arsenale and the International Pavilions, statements are made as crowds of people stop and contemplate, but it is at SA artist Zanele Muholi's oversized portraits that visitors pull out their phones and start snapping themselves and each other. It happens over and over again.

Whether blacked-up or with heavy dreads coiled as a crown, the whites of her eyes peering down, Muholi's blackness is raw and fundamental in her self-portraits

Reaching floor to ceiling and displayed throughout the Biennale, Muholi presents a series of images of herself as different characters, but ultimately they are all her.

This unapologetic self-representation, entitled Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2012-ongoing) is like a magnet, prompting people to make a statement with their camera phones that cannot help but say, among other things, "Look at me, here I am, in front of giant black woman."

While the portraits seem intentionally non-gender (she works tirelessly for the emancipation of LGBTQIA+ communities), there is no disputing race.

Whether blacked-up or with heavy dreads coiled as a crown, the whites of her eyes peering down, her blackness is raw and fundamental.

And it's this power, and the power of her images, that appear to resonate with the crowds.

Next year Muholi will have a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, which will present the full breadth of her photographic and activist practice.

Perhaps here her work will find an even broader audience and give a deeper voice to the visual journey of what it means to be a black African lesbian today.