Kunyangira yaona (iii)

As a multi-disciplinary artist, my work includes site-specific installations, sculpture, printmaking and painting. My projects explore meditative and mindful practices such as sitting still and having conversations as well as prayer and ritual in the setting of traditional architectural spaces and in sacred spaces in nature. I examine the complexities of collective meditative states and the contradictory aspects of the urban and rural psyche in modern-day Zimbabwe.

I create paintings and sculptures with philosophical references to his totems and taboos. In my installations, I reconstruct and deconstruct sacred spaces as interactive spaces to explore the struggles of modern Zimbabweans to reconcile traditional culture and new autonomous subcultures. These subcultures become new and curious beasts that are given form in my sculptures, paintings, and prints. My work is preoccupied with interrogating the systemic postcolonial footprints that haunt to erase indigenous knowledge systems.

A common feature in my work is the combination and assembling of materials that trouble the line between mundane and ritual, not only in Shona cosmology but in several indigenous philosophies. My work takes various forms and assemblages and common among these are continuous lines with eternal interconnectedness. These various iterations and persistent line forms act as coordinates to investigate the mythical cosmologies and meanings of peculiar metaphors, idioms and proverbs, as well as speculative and paranormal ideologies within urban and indigenous subcultures. My work is an allegory that is interpreted through the world of symbols, totemic symbols, ancient language systems, and indigenous motifs.