Online Reporter
Tafadzwa Zimoyo
Zimpapers Entertainment Editor
PEOPLE hesitated at the door of Mbare Art Space before stepping inside.
Shoes came off, socks followed, feet touched sand.
For a brief moment, no one spoke.
That silence was the real opening act of ‘Kushambidzwa: Lines of Discomfort’, the solo exhibition by local visual artist Lomedy Mhako.
This was not an exhibition you walked through casually.
It was one you entered carefully.
Opened recently, and curated by Tafadzwa Mushayi, ‘Kushambidzwa’, it rejected the idea that art should soothe or entertain.
Instead, it leaned into tension.
In an interview with Zimpapers Entertainment Hub, during the official opening session, Mhako said:
“We are very good at pretending things are fine.”
“This work was about stopping that performance.”
The first shock came early. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes before stepping onto river sand spread across the gallery floor.
The act felt intimate, almost intrusive.
“Shoes carry status,” Mhako explained. “When you remove them, you remove protection. You arrive honestly.”
Inside, the space was filled with stacked household objects, chairs, brooms, pegs, mops and cooking tools arranged into strict vertical formations.
At a glance, the structures looked neat, organised and disciplined. Look longer, and they felt fragile, as though one wrong movement could bring everything down.
“That tension was deliberate,” Mhako said. “Order often looks stable until you realise how easily it collapses.”
Unlike conventional exhibitions, there were no obvious centrepieces screaming for attention.
Instead, the work demanded patience.
Visitors slowed down, watching their steps, watching one another.
“I wanted people to become aware of themselves,” Mhako said.
“The discomfort wasn’t only in the objects. It was in the body.”
Much of the exhibition drew from the domestic world a space often overlooked in discussions of power and structure.
Mhako referred to the objects as rurimi rwamai, the mother’s tongue.
“Before school, before language, you learn through doing,” he said.
“Cleaning. Cooking. Repeating. That’s where discipline starts.”
That connection was deepened through Mhako’s collaborative painting process with his mother, Sipiwe Mhako, which he called kudzura.
The collaboration grounded the exhibition emotionally, shifting it from theory to lived experience.
“Working with my mother wasn’t symbolic,” he said. “It was practical. It was where my understanding of order came from.”
The exhibition avoided giving answers.
There were no labels explaining what to feel, no instructions on how to interpret the work.
That uncertainty unsettled some visitors, while others leaned into it. “Discomfort makes people impatient,” Mhako noted.
“But if you sit with it, something opens.”
That philosophy shaped the exhibition’s idea of cleansing.
Mathew Masinge