HUNYANZVI (Mastery), Zurich

13.06 - 11.07. 2025

artHARARE in collaboration with Grisebach presents a compelling group exhibition showcasing the mastery of ten contemporary artists from Zimbabwe - Moffat Takadiwa, Richard Mudariki, Kombo Chapfika, Mostaff Muchawaya, Wallen Mapondera, Gillian Rosselli, Admire Kamudzengerere, Dan Halter, Troy Makaza, and Kudzanai Chiurai.​​

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How do we speak about identity, transformation, or memory without simplifying them? How can the political and the poetic, the spiritual and the material, co-exist within the same frame, resisting containment, resolution, or categorisation? 

 

Hunyanzvi brings together the works of nine artists from Zimbabwe whose practices, while diverse in form and medium, share a refusal to be reduced. The exhibition is grounded in irreducibility: a condition of being that resists closure, singularity, or simplification. It builds on the colloquialism of takachimaster chiround ichi, which speaks to mastering the complexities of fusing aesthetic, poetic, and political elements. It is both a philosophical proposition and a methodological orientation that values complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity as essential to understanding contemporary life.

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At its core, Hunyanzvi asks us to engage with identity as something in motion - constructed, contested, and continually transformed by history, memory, power, and spirituality, much like the artists' home country. The artists in this exhibition draw from distinct cultural, political, and personal contexts. Still, they insist that identity is not a static object to be defined, but a lived and layered process. They explore the relationship between form and formlessness, visibility and opacity, presence and erasure through sculpture, installation, painting, and mixed media.

Across painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media, these artists work against the grain of reductive narratives. Their practices reveal selfhood's layered, contradictory, and often elusive nature, shaped by colonial legacies, cultural memory, political struggle, and spiritual systems. Whether through fragmented portraits, repurposed materials, or dreamlike abstractions, each artist invites us to confront the instability of meaning and the ongoing process of becoming.

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Moffat Takadiwa’s sculptural practice transforms cast-off materials—e-waste, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes—into dense, intricate weavings that defy the aesthetics of disposability. His work calls attention to the environmental and colonial legacies embedded in global waste economies, asserting the potential for renewal and resistance through material transformation. In Takadiwa’s hands, the discarded becomes sacred, opening up a meditation on what society values and what it leaves behind. 

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Richard Mudariki’s paintings inhabit the tension between personal memory and national history. His abstracted portraits—layered, obscured, and fractured—evoke the instability of historical narrative. History, for Mudariki, is not a coherent timeline but a fragmented archive of feelings, omissions, and reassemblies. His figures, often caught between visibility and disappearance, push viewers to confront the politics of representation and the multiplicity of truth. 

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Kombo Chapfika’s abstract works emerge from a spiritual and symbolic visual language rooted in African cosmologies. His practice suggests that reality is shaped not only by material forces but also by energies, myths, and spiritual systems that defy empirical explanation. By invoking the metaphysical, Chapfika’s art becomes a conduit for thinking through the irreducibility of belief, intuition, and ancestral presence—forces that lie beyond rational grasp but deeply inform cultural life. 

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In the portraits of Mostaff Muchawaya, identity appears as a site of continuous negotiation. Blending abstraction with figuration, his works confront the impact of colonial legacies, political violence, and cultural memory on forming the self. The fragmented nature of his figures mirrors the ruptures of personal and collective histories in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial landscape, resisting the notion that identity can be totalised or resolved.

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Wallen Mapondera’s installations rethink space, not merely as physical geography, but as a symbolic and psychological terrain. Using textiles and found materials, he creates environments that evoke the layered nature of land and belonging. His work insists that space is never neutral; it is shaped by histories of dispossession, labour, and memory, and always in a state of becoming. For Mapondera, space is irreducible imbued with pasts that continue to haunt the present. 

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Dan Halter engages the postcolonial condition through conceptual work that weaves text, material, and historical symbolism together. Drawing on his Zimbabwean heritage and diasporic experience, Halter uses woven plastic bags, maps, and currency to reflect on migration, informal economies, and the artificiality of borders. His art challenges static narratives of national identity and surfaces the tensions between personal history and geopolitical forces. 

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Gillian Rosselli transforms the mundane into the uncanny, subverting the familiarity of daily life through surreal compositions and unexpected juxtapositions. Her work engages the imagination as a tool for destabilising what we take for granted. By drawing out the complexities within the banal, Rosselli reveals how even the most ordinary experiences hold emotional and symbolic weight. Her irreducibility lies in the refusal to separate the personal from the poetic. 

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Troy Makaza creates tactile, layered works using silicone and pigment to reflect the entanglement of self-perception and external categorisation. His art embodies the provisional nature of identity—always shaped by context, always in motion. 

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Admire Kamudzengerere explores identity as fragmented and relational through printmaking and performative self-portraits. His practice refuses a single point of origin or meaning, instead offering a shifting mirror in which viewers are implicated in the act of recognition and remembrance. 

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Kudzanai Chiurai’s multimedia practice reimagines political iconography and historical memory in postcolonial Africa. His bold, stylised imagery critiques the myths of nationalism and post-independence liberation, foregrounding the role of art in contesting dominant ideologies. Chiurai constructs counter-histories—alternate visual archives that question who is remembered, who is forgotten, and who gets to author the narrative of a nation. In doing so, his work insists on the multiplicity and mutability of historical truth. 

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Toward a Practice of Refusal

Together, the artists in Hunyanzvi offer a visual and conceptual language of refusal—of simplification, containment, and finality. Their works embrace complexity and contradiction, affirming art’s capacity to transform and unsettle.

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Hunyanzvi invites viewers to reflect on the layered nature of the human condition—on the forces that shape who we are, what we remember, and how we create meaning. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to resist easy answers, and to embrace the irreducible nature of identity in a world shaped by constant change.

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by Fadzai Muchemwa, Curator at National Gallery of Zimbabwe

 

 

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