Zimbabwe

Artists more innovative   

By Stephen Garan’anga        

_{While sculpture in Zimbabwe today takes under its wing all things known to man, is what happens on the wall as exciting and innovative as what happens on the ground, in the air or in the space around us? Is what happens on the wall still a matter of paint on canvas or has painting here also moved away from what we expect or indeed does painting as we have known it, exist at all?}

_{We look at a gallery wall and we see works which could work as well on the ground, works made of essentially materials, or the huge range of “found objects” purloined from everyday life, the protean, the mundane, suddenly made beautiful through engagement in art.}

_{Who would think that a piece of corrugated iron placed against a background of wire netting and placed on a wall would work as an artwork? We look at a hanging construction by Mambakwedza Mutasa made of just such things and suddenly we see colors of the corrugated iron, gleaming silver, sudden shafts of rust which have been turned old gold by the sun, blobs of blue carelessly thrown from a paint can.}

_{We look at the wire netting and it becomes delicate tracery rather than a bit of  fence to keep in the chickens .We look at bamboo, a background to pieces of cardboard and we a composition, a carefully planned and put together work of art.}

_{There’s a new upstart in art in Zimbabwe, work by young artists who are not afraid which upends the traditional ideas of the use of space , time and place , work which engages the most traditional of materials in an essentially post modern ,dialogue and discourse.}

_{Masimba Hwati and Percy Manyonga  take us on journeys through time ,space ,culture and the natural environment, as old as time , as new as we care to make it.}

_{Manyonga takes a canvas, scribbles it under cipherable signs, pastes it with old newspapers and hangs from its bundles of bones wrapped up in canvas.}

_{Hwati uses traditional means tom fashion from clay vessels and heads which when placed together, impact obscure and altogether strange biblical messages, prophecies which have or may come true.}

_{And Manyonga places stones on canvas, old stones, stones which might been used to make flints during Stone Age, stones which look like fragments of granite caves used as backgrounds for paintings in pigment by the late Stone Age rock artists. Fraught with symbolism, both these artists’ works have a relationship with the history of creative expression in Zimbabwe since man first came to the plateau}

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_{David Chinyama has been an abstract painter whose works convey his own moods and feelings about what he sees around him, and the ‘’issue’’ that the land has become.}

_{Chinyama has veered away from the brush, engaged the cloth and the sponge to great effect, and heaped up cloth on his canvases to convey lumps of burnt earth in a series haunting paints which deal with the destruction of the land its inhabitants by man.}

_{But moving away from ‘’straight painting’’, Chinyama has taken to the use of found objects to create works of three dimensions.}

_{In the Harare Biennale 2004 at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, in a series of paintings in which color seems to have caught fire, he took the inside of a refrigerator and affixed it to the canvas.}

_{In another piece he fashioned an open door to convey the passage of time between birth and death. So Chinyama too used the wall in a different way. How do we see these new works? In general, terms are part of a need by artists to define the space traditionally used for art in Zimbabwe in a new way.  And part of the current concern of artists to delve into bins and hunt backyards to find materials which they can make into art.}

_{They take stones from under the ground and make them into sculptures which are immortal, transcendent of culture time and place but they also scrounge the tips and car yards, tear down back fences and wrap the insides of the fridge. In art nothing is sacred any more; everything and anything from the wing of a butterfly to the scale of a fish can be made into art. And no space or place has even been sacred. Houses and cave walls have been backgrounds for paintings, and slabs of granite have been hurled over the country to make massive pieces of sculptures that sculpture stand in the bush, the scrub, in the most in hospitable of landscapes.}

_{It’s not where it is, it’s what it is, and that is the way of art- the Sphinx in the desert sands of Egypt, the sculptures in the dank earth of Tengenenge, the refrigerator springs like a loose tooth from the canvas.}