adminStephen Garan’anga Visual Art
I first got acquainted with Mavis Tauzeni’s works of art about mid-year 2011 when the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, in collaboration with Courteney Hotel were calling for female artists in Zimbabwe to participate in an exhibition for women by women.
Interested female artists were requested to create paintings of their choice guided by the theme “Beauty of Creation” and young Mavis participated in her debut professional career show.
About the same period there was a photography art competition, which was open to women and girls only and their images were focusing on the role of women in society today. This was in a way to see how the women see other women, the positives, the negatives, the well-known and the untold.
The theme was “Women by Women”. Tauzeni’s talent was being nurtured by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe School of Visual Art and Design. These issues of women’s emancipation from some of our traditional past dictates seem to have dug a foundation for her professional art career to take-off.
Women, the very epitome of human decorum, desperately bloom to impart beauty traits around them, in the home, workplace, and world at large. Continual uplifting of women in all sectors is a developmental key of African people as they are equally shrewd, critically bond our family structures, fosterage of children, constitute the majority of the population amongst various things, yet for far too long they have been marginalised in numerous developmental aspects by various past traditional laws. In recent years, major steps have been undertaken to correct the imbalances though the cause still meets stiff resistance from some who feel uncomfortable with the changes.
Today four years later, about the same middle year period, art lady Tauzeni has achieved a milestone in a professional art career by staging her debut solo exhibition under the theme “Eve’s Diaries” currently showing at First Floor Gallery Harare, Second Floor, 24 George Silundika Avenue.
Her work has changed immensely and is now the kind that can be proudly presented anywhere alongside that of the experienced. Her fairly big canvases mainly in acrylics are full of life, colour and unhesitant strokes with uncontrolled drips.
Her subjects are of fellow females withholding precious life in the womb and their beauty in such pieces as “He’s a she, she is a he”, “Kana Ndikadai”, “Return to innocence”, “Element of freedom 1 and 2”, “Tears of a woman”, “Baby girl you still a flower” and “Hang out to dry” parts I to VI.
In her artist statement for the show she expressed that, “By definition diaries are accounts of events (records) at times, private experiences observation, feelings and attitude, fears, dreams and more. Eve was the first known female figure, life bearer and mother of all living.
“For me this body of work then, is a chronicle of a life journey through the eyes of a female, her strength, weakness, wishes, dreams, fears, aspirations, fantasies, her vision and views her unheard voice. It is trying to open a door to a different room, knowing it is there but not sure if you want to enter and if you are prepared to see what you will be about to see there. An adventure into the unlimited I would say.
“Traditionally, socially, culturally and historically we have been told where we are meant to be, where we fit the order of things, but who says? According to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is not survival of the fittest or is it survival of the smartest but of the one most able to adapt. What is this adaptation require for Eve’s daughters in the present world? How does she deal with the world, which says it is giving her power and knowledge, not necessarily the space to exercise it leaving the question as to what degree the world is prepared to give her that space?
“For — socially, physically and culturally without that space — a daughter of the new breed of Eve, bound by traditional and social norms, is bound to remain a butterfly in caterpillar state for too long.
I ask, how am I going to be given the chance to bloom (the element of freedom) when I am always meant to stay closely tied to my bed? If we are flowers and if it is within our nature to bloom, give us the means and room. Give me an opportunity to have my voice be heard for once and not just heard and also listened to.”
These are the thoughts of today’s woman, who might not have been given the opportunity to be heard due to her sex, cultural constraints, but at this point she can pour her heart out on many issues she is concerned about, whether be it physically, sexually, mentally, culturally and socially.
With this in mind welcome to “Eve’s Diaries.”
Online Reporter