happiness Chikwanha
Arts Reporter
Visual artist Kresiah Mukwazhi has made history as the first Zimbabwean creative whose art collection is now showing at Art Basel Switzerland.
The former National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design student made the grade with her monumental work dubbed ‘Nyenyedzi Nomwe’.
Nyenyedzi Nomwe (The Seven Sisters Pleiades) is a 26-foot-long work made of more than a thousand elastic straps, fabric, and clasps from used bras.
According to the monumental curatorial statement, Mukwazhi focuses on the sex workers that keep striking in the suburbs of her birth town.
The work challenges a patriarchal system that brutally restrains the female body.
The title of the installation refers to the Pleiades constellation, which, in Greek mythology, embodies the seven sisters turned into stars so that they could not be raped.
Mukwazhi summons these mythological figures as a way of protecting all the abused, violated and marginalised women on the planet “to restore their sacred feminine power and heal the world.”
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter