Zimbabwean Participation in the 54th Venice Biennale

As we work to participate at the Venice Biennale several elements of world order have unraveled including the tsunami in Japan and the turmoil in the Arab world, the recent floods and earthquakes in Australia and New Zealand. All this follows on the back of the Western worlds financial bubble burst! In the face of this, Africa appears to be currently enjoying a lull instead of the seemingly constant crises that often appear to bedevil the continent, forcing it to lean this way and that, up and down yet remaining always there, hovering in the background with all its exotic cultures and its own share of natural and human disasters.

Africa and African artists have been underrepresented at the Venice Biennale. Only one African country, Egypt, has maintained a national pavilion. As a result it has been easy to dismiss the continent with a single brush stroke as a painful and needy blob, reaching out and ready to receive food, money, and every type of assistance possible while remaining in the past as a phenomena that at once collided with the West but having subsequently retreated into a sphere of unimportance after the attainment of Independence. In the West, this mass that is Africa appears blurred, grey and somewhat unconnected to the tide of contemporary world order and its moving forward under the frenetic conducting of the Western World. Zimbabwe’s bold move to participate at this event is meant to send a clear and present message, a message of engagement, of resilience and of anything but a grey and peripheral blob.

The Theme of this year’s Venice Biennale calls all nations to introspection and expression of their own light and idiosyncrasies  and it is in response to this call that Zimbabwe will be presenting “SEEING OURSELVES : Questioning our geography, landscape and space we occupy from yesterday, today and tomorrow”.

Seeing Ourselves is an internal call to introspection and presents a window into the life of the nation of Zimbabwe through the eyes of four selected artists. Zimbabwe has remained under the spotlight for several years during which time  our image has shifted away from being the  beautiful and desirable house of stone – a nationally significant  material on which our reputation and very soul has been proudly built. Instead, the perception of us has undergone a radical shift as we are often seen as not so desirable and not so beautiful. This  full circle is perhaps not so hard to understand as a country moves away from its colonial confinement to embark on  its own national building process which so far is a mere 30 years during which we search for and refine all the tools and applications of our collective being.

Seeing Ourselves catapults itself from a place of established and recognized contemporary art history that has seen many a country and authority recognizing our artistic sensitivity, practice as well as communicative spirit,  to embrace a wider global language of art that includes non literal but creative painting, video medium as well as photography and the installation.

The four artists that we are presenting each embrace different aspects of the contemporary artists’ language choosing to manipulate these  media in order to tell the stories and narratives of this country as we inch towards self realization and undergo the inevitable  highs and lows through which all nations have to pass  The presentation showcases veteran sculptor, Tapfuma Gutsa who above all other sculptors has contributed to the shaping of our glorious stone past, beginning as a missionary trained artist who showed great dexterity and insight into creating sculpture using wood and stone. His first sojourn in the United Kingdom while undertaking tertiary training saw him returning with a more complex palette and going to great personal sacrifice  to encourage his fellow sculptors to rearrange their palettes while infusing their established practice with all manner of additional materials that empowered many sculptors to move away form the tradition of collective “Shona “stone carving to begin to formulate an individual journey and  to express the things of their individual and communal hearts in unique ways. His second sojourn overseas has seen him don the stuff of contemporary installation practice that gathers everything and anything that can be processed to speak of the individual and collective psyche and what it means to be Zimbabwean. Gutsa brings to the show a very eclectic, traveled and penetrating maturity that has stories to tell and to share. He continues to travel with his distinct adornment that usually consists of natural gourds, horns, roots and ropes while stooping to point to the occasional pearls that have become lodged between the garbage.

Video artist Berry Bickle presents a minority perspective in the context of Zimbabwe through her thirty years sifting through and research into the memory and material that symbolize the differences that mark our diversity,  while remaining alert to the need for tolerance and the constantly striving to explore  the beauty of our meeting points. A white artist that opted to see the people and activities that have always been an intricate part of our beautiful  physical landscape,  her work has often been marked by ecstatic beauty or excruciating pain  that our beautiful lands have  undergone. Her latest images go even farther to reveal what overlap and layering could contribute as a result of the collective realignments in the evolving  Zimbabwe.

Photographer, Calvin Dondo, has quietly contributed to the development of photography in the country in a very determined and hands-on manner. We are presenting his ongoing research project currently being undertaken in Germany in which he tracks a number of German couples that have adopted African children and the evolution of these new families over recent years. The work is extremely valuable and compelling as one not only experiences the obvious physical diversities in these families but as the recorder he experiences many layers of issues that naturally evolve with the changing ages, identify, cultural understanding and  searches that such families undergo. Over the years this project has yielded a myriad of possible directions for the artist as the meaning of identity and sense of self has been thrown more poignantly into sharp relief.

The young blood in the group is Misheck Masamvu, an artist that has been identified for his consistent and accomplished painting skills as well as his penetrating subject that reveals his willingness to move beyond the immediately commercial and engage with the sometimes positively uncomfortable. Masamvu has used his art to narrate a great deal of the private and public aspirations and realizations of Zimbabwe in a language, which is lyrical, poetic, material and also spiritual. Much of his earlier work was extremely personal while this Venice Collection reveals a broader lens while remaining freshly painterly and independently narrative.          .

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe is extremely proud to be taking theses artists to Venice and do so hope that their collective showcasing will entice new audiences for Zimbabwean art while revealing just what is going on quietly in Africa that is positive and far reaching.

Doreen Sibanda, Commissioner-
Executive Director
National Gallery of Zimbabwe