Batonga revisited

Skies”.
Collaborating with Harare Polytechnic visual art lecturers and former applied arts and design students Ronald Mutemere, Priviledge Garadi, Cosmas Shiridzinomwa,

Misheck Manasa, and mid-career artist Masimba Hwati, the artists experiment technically and visually with alternative raw material derived from the Zimbabwean soil — in an exhibition of sculptures, relief work and collages which break the boundaries between sculpture and painting.
The weaving of baskets is as old as the history of man.

Basketry is a living art form and cultural science which enters into our everyday life. Traces of baskets have been found in the Egyptian Pyramids, and woven basket liners have left their impressions inside the fragments of ancient pottery.
In Zimbabwe, the Tonga are famed for their intricately woven symbolic workmanship.

In this exhibition, Gutsa employs the line as an expressive tool.
With austere simplicity, formal organisation and complexity of form he creates detailed collages on canvas using basket weave, serpentine stone, indigenous twigs and reeds.

The existence of an indigenous aesthetic consciousness is so deftly re-imagined in Gutsa’s contemporary socio-mythological works.
Glyphs and schools of fish and other amphibious beings are brought to life in his two-dimensional collages.
The exhibition which is sponsored by Sida and the Culture Fund is currently running at the Harare Polytechnic situated between Prince Edward West and Herbert Chitepo Avenue, will be opened and graced by the Swedish Ambassador to Zimbabwe, His Excellency Andres Liden. Also featuring at the exhibition is an amorphous and amphibian dance routine choreographed and performed by Tumbuka’s, Tawanda Chabikwa and Company, who took part in the Hifa 2012 dance programme.

The show also featured rising mbira star Hope Masike with some indelible and evocative new mbira compositions based on the theme of water and the Zambezi River known to the Tonga as “Mulonga”.