HARARE // MUNDOPA + NYAUDE

 

Opening night: 13th August, 6pm
Exhibition continues until 6th September

 

An exhibition of bold new work by two young Zimbabwean painters, Wycliffe Mundopa and Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude.

Cities are omnivorous behemoths. The feed on and grow on the energy, dreams, hopes and the dramas of the lives of their inhabitants. Over time, they evolve into creatures with unique personalities, which subsume those of their denizens. She lives in Paris sounds different to the she who lives in Lagos, or Johannesburg or New York. And while all citizens shape the image of the city they live in, the mythology a biography of a city is most powerfully established through the symbiosis with the lives of the artists, who live and work there. Few can imagine Paris without paintings the Impressionists and novels of Hemingway, Dumas, Proust, Henry Miller, few can think of Johannesburg without the songs of Miriam Makeba.
Perhaps Harare does not as yet speak with voice audible on a global scale, but the metropolis is the crucible in which the aspirations of today’s Zimbabwean are forged. It is the stage-set for the country’s march through historical drama of independence, which is spelt out in lofty principles but is lived out in extraordinary circumstances of ordinary lives in the city. It is among these lives that we find Mundopa and Nyaude, two poets for whom Harare is an inevitable and an imperative inspiration. The city they find hard to love and impossible not to.

Mundopa’s Harare is a woman, self-consciously and at the same time effortlessly charming and surprising, a proud custodian of tradition despite every colonial effort to defeat and oppress her and rising up to meet every challenge that daily life presents, failing, compromising but undefeated. Nyaude’s Harare is a svengali, a shrewd and amusing operator, who captivates, amuses, deceives and spins tales of that, which is not seen despite being seen in broad daylight. The Harare they show us is a noisy bombardment of bodies, objects, allegorical and figurative, terse and exhilarating, poignant and sardonic, elegant and jarring. The two artists are a juggernaut partnership attacking their daily realities with humour, wit and painterly wizardry stewed in the sauces of slang, traditional wisdom and love for their hometown. The ying and yang conversation between the two saturates us in the passions of the city and builds an indelible stereoscope of Harare and one which will shape our view of the city forever.

 

Text: Valerie Kabov

Exhibition co-curated by:

HAZARD, First Floor Gallery Harare and Beathur Mgoza Baker