I See You: Virginia Chihota, Gideon Gomo, Masimba Hwati, Gareth Nyandoro and Portia Zvavahera

In a departure from her works to date, Portia Zvavahera uses materials sourced in Lagos, such as bees wax and primed linen, to continue her exploration of painting and print-making.  With an interest in adire, a popular technique in Nigeria of dying fabric that was traditionally done with indigo and at times incorporates repeated stenciled motifs, Zvavahera continues to interpret her dreams in her exhibited works. These compositions merge abstract and figural forms that seem to depict connections, isolation and fear through gestural contours. Zvavahera leaves the viewer to connected fragmented narratives, perhaps as an invitation to imagine how her unique encounter with Lagos, briefly living and working in this city as an artist-in-residence at Guest Artist Space (G.A.S. Foundation), informs this body of work.

 

Gideon Gomo’s stoneworks are contemporary inflections of Zimbabwean springstone carving, a cornerstone of modern art in that region.  Bringing this technique into conversation with contemporary modes of making, Gomo combines this granite with other materials such as brass cymbals, appropriated as headgear, halos or adornment. Each head is emotive, a contrast with the relatively inanimate Shona stone carvings earlier referenced. Gomo began these sculptures in Harare, and completed them in Lagos, also while an artist-in-residence at G.A.S. Foundation. 

During this period, he also worked with mahogany and cedar wood sourced from Makoko in Lagos. With these large trunks, Gomo used a chainsaw to transform these heads that connect aesthetically to figural forms that also allude to Zimbabwean stone carving.  The subject matters he explores through these wooden heads range from bleaching among men in Lagos, gender obscurity, and emotional burdens that he personally bears when compared to his ancestors.  The latter is suggested by the incorporation of hata–referred to as ‘headrest’ or osuka in Lagos.  These torus, tire-like shapes, are made with fabric or plant fibers, and are used across the continent to ease the burden of carrying a heavy load on one’s head.

 

Masimba Hwati’s work connects to that of Gomo’s as he too integrates brass material from musical instruments into his work. In this sonic approach to sculpture, Hwati presents instruments that are composed of plastic and wooden spheres, goat horns, skateboard wheels, and integrated percussive instruments.  Presented on white plinths, Hwati’s sculptures confront modernist, colonial approaches to displaying art, harnessing interventions and hybridized ideas of otherness. These works are activated during a one-time performance that responds to Dzikamunhenga–an ancient Shona instrument, and will be realised with Lagos-based musician, Temitope Fash.  The two artists plan to use Hwati’s sculpture to create earth vibrations, through a conduit that situates the earth as a third collaborator–and as an anchor of human life, a place to which ancestors return upon their death.

 

Connecting Harare to Lagos, the exhibition presents a unique consideration of intra-continental exchange and friendship through contemporary reflections that manifest as performative, cooperative and spiritual.  As an expression of friendships cultivated over two decades between these artists, and others that have emerged in the development of the project, I See You is a marker of time, community, and a significant moment in the careers of these artists.