Images That Resound With Cultural Appropriation

A Zimbabwean quintet not only rekindles old school years connections with their exhibition at Tiwani Contemporary’s Lagos location, but also extends an intra-continental cultural handshake to the local art community. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports

A tangled mess of mysterious images, seething with cryptic expressions, first assails the viewer’s senses with a note of urgency. Soon, the receding fogginess seems to lift on these visuals, which seem to piece themselves into a bigger picture in a manner that hints at some coherence. Sticking out easily amidst the visual bedlam is an arm that seems to signal STOP. Then, there is also a blooming flower known as Callistemon, which represents both a sign of the season in Zimbabwe and encouragement from the Almighty.

This serigraphy and ink drawing on canvas work by the Zimbabwean female artist Virginia Chihota is only one of a three-work series, titled “Nharo Dzakanyarara” (A Quiet Resistance). This resistance, according to her, has to do with a “prayer against… bad energies that cause pain, misunderstandings, limitations—the list is endless….”

Something about the series’ visual clutter, in its hideous incoherence, evokes the negative energies that the artist alludes to. They lift the veil on the state of man’s finer material surroundings, which are densely populated by intuitive volitions or thought forms that embody and express their fundamental meanings.

Chihota’s cryptic compositions are featured alongside the works of her four compatriots and contemporaries at the Zimbabwe National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design (formerly B. A. T. Visual Arts School)—three males and one other female—in an exhibition titled I See You, which opened at Tiwani Gallery in Victoria Island, Lagos, on Friday, November 4 and ends on Saturday, January 14, next year. 

Her work resonates with Portia Zvavahera’s composition, which combines aspects of painting and printmaking and strives to interpret her dreams. The latter, who was briefly an artist-in-residence at the Guest Artist Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Oniru, Lagos, appropriated elements of locally-dyed Nigerian fabric known as “adire” into her work. This explains why her painting was composed of beeswax and primed linen that were sourced in Lagos. In the oil-based printing ink and oil bar on linen work, titled “Ranganai Henyu” (Devise Your Strategy), an abstract figural form that alludes to a recumbent sleeping figure seems to be the focal point of peripheral entities, some of which are intent on shielding it from bodily harm.

Extending this blur of painterly compositions, Gareth Nyandoro’s two large-scale works on canvas jostle for the viewer’s attention. There is a distinct male figure in each of the paintings, engaged in activities that reflect these times. In one of the paintings, a figure is holding a Zoom meeting against the backdrop of a stuffed bookshelf, while in the other painting, a man, holding a measuring tape, is apparently constructing upholsteries for furniture.

As a contrast to the numbing aesthetics of the 2-D offerings, Gideon Gomo’s stone carvings, which are evocative of antiques, wrench the viewer into their dialectical orbit. The works, titled “Ko Ini Ndisinawo Hata,” were contrived from spring stones (an exceptionally hard, dark stone used in Shona sculpture) and are a series of carved human heads with wide open mouths, somewhat reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which are combined with brass cymbals and suspended from the ceiling with cords. The artist, who was also recently an artist-in-residence at the G.A.S. Foundation, had completed these carvings in Lagos, which he started back in Harare. During his residency programme in Lagos, he also carved a series of heads in mahogany titled “Chiwono Chemukati,” which are suspended above each other on a single rope to illustrate how tendencies and emotional burdens are passed down through a generational chain. While illustrating these “burdens,” he employs the metaphor of a torus-shaped pad for carrying heavy loads, known as “hata” in his native tongue, which he places between all of the heads save the one at the bottom, which hangs at a greater distance from the others above it.

As a complement to Gomo’s intriguing installation, Masimba Hwati’s offering seems to be a homage to musical wind instruments. A befuddling contraption of wind instrument carcasses, discarded plastic, wooden balls, goat horns, and skateboard wheels, the mixed-media work titled “Dzikamunhenga” 3 and 4 are positioned on white plinths. By utilising interventions and hybridised concepts of otherness, Hwati’s sculptures challenge modernist, colonial techniques of exhibiting art. 

These pieces, according to a statement from Tiwani Contemporary Gallery, will be brought to life during a one-time performance that reacts to the Dzikamunhenga, an old Shona instrument, in collaboration with the Lagos-based musician Temitope Fash. By positioning the earth as a third partner, an anchor for human life, and a place where ancestors return after passing away, the two artists intend to use Hwati’s sculpture as a conduit to produce earth vibrations.

For this National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design alumni quintet, the exhibition is an opportunity and a platform for reigniting the friendship of their good old school years in Harare in the 1990s. This explains the mind-numbing similarity and shared ideologies displayed in their colour selection. Then there is also the fact that Chihota, Zvavahera, Hwati, and Nyandoro featured in the 2013 and 2015 editions of the Venice Biennale, under the artistic direction of Raphael Chikukwa, now the Executive Director at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Recently, shortly before this exhibition, Zvavahera and Gomo were artists in residence at the G. A. S. Foundation, Lagos, where they researched “adire”, tie-and-dying techniques, printmaking, sculpture, and assemblages made from local materials. In a manner of speaking, the artists have, through this exhibition, been afforded uncommon access to the Lagos art community.