The Assistant Curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe
Distinguished guests
Members of the Diplomatic corps
NGZ Students, ladies and gentlemen

It is my greatest pleasure to welcome you to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art School final year exhibition. I am honoured to have the opportunity to officially open an exhibition by young artists in the making. Changing Times is an exhibition that contains an intense emotional load and a powerful aesthetic impact on the visual contemporary approach.

The experimental use of new materials epitomizes the boldness within the young artists to explore the different means in which they can narrate situation, events and feelings.

The workshop school was opened in 1981 under the sponsorship of the British America Tobacco hence being named the BAT Visual Art School. The Norwegian Embassy then took over from BAT and is currently the sole funder of the now National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art School. The school has been a major machinery through which most of today’s practicing artists of significance have emerged.

It has produced over a hundred young artists who have established themselves so well in the industry, acquiring good skills that enable them to reach out to the community. I am grateful to the Norwegian Embassy for their unwavering support over the past years. However, as we are subject to review, the school has had a difficult time this year when it had to make use of few resources to a large number of students. For this I would like to thank the NGZ teachers for their hard work and the students for their perseverance during a time when we had so little.

More so, with our present facilities the school has to reduce the number of first year students intake as we also extend our course to third year. We do hope that in 2011 we take full stride of this initiative. At the moment we are working towards engaging the National Gallery Visual Art School with a higher tertiary education institution and we have so far approached Chinhoyi University of Technology and the Harare Polytechnic. I do hope that any one of these institutions will help us uplift the face of our arts curriculum to degree level.

Lastly I would like to thank all the sponsors who sponsored prizes for outstanding students.

With these few words I declare the Changing Times exhibition officially opened.