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At the Gallery
With a career spanning over two decades, the Dzimbanhete Arts Interactions Founder has created new works in print and video medium that disperse a message that is truth seeking with transcendent yet polemic undertones.
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe returns to the First National Bank Johannesburg Art Fair, taking place from September 9, 2016. The exhibition will be a solo show featuring veteran artist and scholar Chikonzero Chazunguza in a show entitled “Seuswa/Akin to Grass”.
With a career spanning over two decades, the Dzimbanhete Arts Interactions Founder has created new works in print and video medium that disperse a message that is truth seeking with transcendent yet polemic undertones.
“Seuswa” at the art fair is an amplification of the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2015 project which ran under the theme “Pixels of Ubuntu;” therein, Chazunguza’s work dwelt on the pixilation of the Zimbabwean identity through the crises of modernity, assimilation and acculturation.
His work dwelt of superimposing images of modern tight jeans wearing youth with their “nyakare” era antecedents.
The exhibition deliberately sets to define the moment when the camera met with the African continent, specifically the moments after people were disconnected from their geographical spaces — the portrayal of the African was always bent at knee and elbow with face tilted downward; the re-assembled African often in uniform as part of a symbiotic order that stood bolt straight for crown and colony, Chazunguza places his focus on this order of observers who watched as space was torn from this variable group in an extenuating motion that has become a panacea through time.
The metaphor within the exhibition headline has connections to proverbial lines concerning the conflict between elephants, the greatest casualty in the fallout between the giants is often the grass; the people of the nyakare era where testament to remotely observing a heavy wind of change form philosophically guided life to a harsh, capitalist machine chopping down their values and ideals and presenting the barrel of a gun and bible with the intent to culminate in the full erasure of identity.
In his paintings, prints as well as in his installations Chazunguza is known for experimenting with a variety of materials, including objects of everyday African life, challenging issues of subtle colonial conditions in Africa on land distribution, food insecurity, degradation of indigenous spirituality, traditional order and rituals. His latest body of work interrogates memory, history and identity.
Chikonzero Chazunguza is a Zimbabwean visual artist and provocateur, whose multidisciplinary artworks raise searching questions about the post-colonial condition and about the unstable role and nature of art in its post-colonial context.
He was born and raised in Highfield, Harare and earned his MFA at the Institute of Pictorial Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited in several group and solo shows on the continent, in Europe and North America where his work has also been collected.
He is the founder of the arts and culture resource centre Dzimbanhete Arts Interactions which could be the answer to the future of Zimbabwean contemporary art.
“Seuswa/Akin to Grass” will run from September 9-11 2016 at the First National Bank (FNB) Johannesburg Art Fair at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Online Reporter