Online Reporter
Tafadzwa Zimoyo
Zimpapers Entertainment Editor
A SOLO exhibition by local visual artist Lomedy Mhako has opened at Mbare Art Space, inviting audiences into a contemplative encounter with discomfort, memory and lived experience.
Curated by Tafadzwa Mushayi, “Kushambidzwa: Lines of Discomfort” proposed cleansing not as purity or renewal, but as confrontation.
Mhako insisted that healing could not begin without first acknowledging disorder.
“We were always rushing to fix things,” the artist reflected, “but we did not sit long enough with what was already broken or uncomfortable.
Kushambidzwa was about staying there.”
From the moment visitors entered the space, the exhibition resisted passive viewing.
Shoes were removed, and feet met river sand. The gesture was subtle yet destabilising, stripping away status and daily performance, professional titles, authority and composure and replacing them with bodily awareness and shared vulnerability.
“Removing shoes was a leveller,” Mhako explained. “It reminded us that before we were workers, parents or artists, we were bodies carrying weight.”
This embodied approach signalled Mhako’s broader artistic language, one that treated the gallery as a site of experience rather than display.
The exhibition unfolded spatially and ceremonially, asking viewers to participate rather than observe from a distance.
“I did not want people to feel like they were consuming the work,” he said. “I wanted them to feel implicated in it.”
Mhako’s multi-disciplinary practice spanned installation, object-based work and painting, including a collaborative process with his mother, Sipiwe Mhako, which he termed “kudzura.”
The collaboration was not sentimental but structural. “Working with my mother was about acknowledging where knowledge started,” he noted. “Before school, before institutions, there was the home.”
Throughout the exhibition, linear formations dominated the space — vertical stacks, repetitive alignments and controlled arrangements of found objects. These lines evoked systems of order: labour structures, discipline, governance and social organisation. While they appeared stable at first glance, their fragility quickly became evident.t
