The underground operator of Zimbabwean art — who is ‘present and confident — but not loud’
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.with cartoonishly elongated wattles and comb, is an idiosyncratic feature of the artist Admire Kamudzengerere’s oeuvre. in Shona, Kamudzengerere’s mother tongue — has become one of the most striking symbols in Zimbabwe’s recent visual history.
For its role in being the first to spy the streaks of the new day and setting our routines, some political organisations, including in Zimbabwe and Malawi, have adopted it as their symbol. However, the rooster of Kamudzengerere’s imagination isn’t the bird that would have roamed his ancestral rural home in Zvimba, 80km south-west of Harare, not far from former president Robert Mugabe’s homestead in Kutama.
To rectify this, he invited Kamudzengerere, born in 1981, to stage his inaugural solo display at the national gallery. Titled, the show was held in late 2010, and comprised drawings, paintings and prints. It’s a measure of how much he was rising as a creator that the national gallery presentation was, in fact, his second solo effort in 2010.
clandestine group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation’s solidarity by any means at their disposal.Gutsa, a perspicacious thinker, was identifying one of Kamudzengerere’s key traits — his self-effacing demeanour, the quiet way he goes about his life and practice. Present-day Chitungwiza inherited the name of the capital of the last medium of the spirit of the prophet Chaminuka, Pasipamire . According to oral tradition, Pasipamire was a miracle worker, a rainmaker who could hammer wooden pegs into granite boulders and conjure magical mists that made his capital invisible from invaders — the reason Chitungwiza was sometimes known as the “elusive city”.
Take, for instance, the figure of the rooster. Its rendition now is less sinister as when it first appeared. It is benign, like the domestic rooster we all know and whose role is to mark time . When Kamudzengerere enrolled for his advanced levels at Hatfield Girls High School in the late 1990s, in the formerly white suburb of Hatfield, he was venturing north out of the drudgery and dust of the ghetto of Chitungwiza.
A turning point in the master-student relationship was in the early 2000s, a period of intense domestic and professional pressure for Mugocha. He was preparing for an annual group show organised by Helen Lieros at Gallery Delta and was having trouble choosing two works to display. Kamudzengerere soon started attending weekend painting and drawing lessons. For the next decade, he had a close association with the institution, which culminated in his first solo show in June 2010.
“These two were not interested in that kind of art even though they understood it was an alternative for making money quickly. They feared that it ruined an artist’s career. Had I done it, I would have used another name. I didn’t want to be associated with that kind of work.”Often in life, as in the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, the child who leaves becomes the centre of attention, for whom the fattened calf is slaughtered on their return.
This exhibition is a response to a question he voiced to me: “What happens if I combine, if I experiment with, both painting and printmaking?” There was a desire on his part, to use a phrase he employed, “to go beyond painting”.
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