First Floor Gallery Harare
Making Space 2022
makingspace2022 false WORKS
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DOCUMENTS
589237
Helen Teede
Reeds in the Wind 2, 2021
Oil on canvas
49¼ x 39⅜ in.
125 x 100 cm
HT0076
$ 6,500.00 USD
Artemisia
“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” - ‘I am human and nothing human is alien to me’ Terence ( Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) Roman- African Roman playwright 163 BCE)
Any door to knowledge, open from any point and in any direction, can through the power of curious inquiry lead any of us to the broadest and surprising interconnected discoveries. Our systems of knowledge even when they evolve discretely, at their natural extremes seek to converge holistically. State of cognitive dissonance while frequent for most humans is not a stable one, psychologically or biologically, or cognitively.
These are some of the dynamic equilibria that Helen Teede is hoping to establish in Artemisia, building bridges across epistemic divides serendipitously and by design. The title Artemisia, a name derived from the Greek goddess Artemis – the hunter and protector of nature, is also the name of the Artemisia Gentileschi, the woman painter as a feminist icon in life and practice, is also the name of an ancient Greek queen and a naval commander Artemisia of Caria, who lived in fourth century BCE. By coincidence, Artemisia is also a plant, native to Zimbabwe, known as the ‘Mother of all herbs’ benefiting pregnant women, through history. Artemisia is crucial in Africa, protecting people from malaria and in 2020 was being looked at for the possibility of protecting people for covid. Artemisia then becomes for Teede a byword and a key to a matrix in which contemporary environmental concerns, mythology become a platform for the interconnectedness of cultures and histories through nature and feminist narrative.
Reconciliation of myth and reality through the prism of history is unequivocally a motivator and foundation for Teede’s practice, which while rooted in Zimbabwe is evolving in the conversation between cultures and continents, with Italy as a touchstone and a counterpoint.
Before embarking on her BFA at Michaelis in Cape town, Teede first studied painting at Florence University of the Arts. She chose to return to Italy for her Masters in Visual Art at IUAV University of Venice, which she completed in 2020 with a thesis and exhibition exploring, “Phenomenology of Painting as an Intersectional Medium”.
Graduate studies catalysed the dialogical in Teede’s practice. Prior to commencing her master’s studies, the Zimbabwean landscape was her primary context for articulating the political – nature and land as space, where the struggle for independence took place and which still hold the key to all future possibilities for the country and its people. Spending time in Venice, and studies in anthropology, especially during lockdown have created an urgency to articulate and situate the complicity of humans in the environment. Introducing the drawn figure, created a shift from the gestural and emotive lushness of earlier work towards greater precision and clarity.
Returning to Zimbabwe in 2020 after three years away, added another layer of content and context. A quest for reconciliation – cultural, historical, and emotional between the disparate contexts she has been working in and a reckoning with the intersectionality of feminism, decoloniality, and art history. Artemisia emerged as a synthesis for these conversations but with the confidence of an artist who is not just commenting on the world but also on art history from the perspective of a woman and a female artist, who does not need to be categorized in her personhood or her practice.
The works in the exhibition are generous and expansive narratives, each canvas taking a single colour as a point of departure, with the drawing and gesture synthesizing the poetic, the passionate, and the vulnerable at the core of ideas around social and ecological justice in this turbulent time. There is space for song, pleasure, despair, joy, fear, and optimism. Everything human and nothing that is alien to any of us.
Valerie Kabov
Available
821326
Shamilla Aasha
Nostalgia 1, 2021
Embroidery and found fabric on canvas
95⅝ x 95⅝ in.
243 x 243 cm
SA0005
$ 2,500.00 USD
Breathing Time Parts 1-11, embroidery and found fabric on canvas
The expressions ‘I need space’ or ‘to have space’ are commonplace in our speech. And yet, when we say space, we actually mean ‘time’…a particular type of time – a time without other obligations, pressures, commitments, priorities. And space for yourself is then a time, for someone to be themselves, to be able to choose to be practical or not, to follow an idea without knowing exactly where it will lead, to be introspective without apology, to daydream, without necessarily having anything to show for it at the end, except a smile.
While even in the most ordinary circumstances this kind of time is not commonly available to adults, with pressures of survival, work, parenting, it became even less so during the pandemic lockdown; and even less so for women in social settings where they are still responsible for most of childcare and therefore home schooling of children; and even less for women artists, who are parents trying to construct time and space out of shards of a day left after caring in the same environment, where there is no genuine square centimeter which is yours and yours alone.
This was both the seed and the soil for Shamilla Aasha’s ‘Breathing Time’ and yet this exhibition is a gift of breath and freedom that she not only claimed for herself but also generously shares with us. Her embroidery is intricate and patient and yet is entirely playful and unfettered by any desire to conform. The formality of stretched canvases only underscores the unpredictability which is nothing short of a quest to be oneself, unquestionably and without a need for defiance. There is both harmony, elegance and a pathos in these works, which simply arrive and are, and don’t need to earn our attention because they already own it. The dignity which speaks to a whole humanity we all seek for ourselves and which art helps us find.
Valerie Kabov
Curator
©2021
Available
904807
Shamilla Aasha
Blindness part 3, 2021
Sewing patterns. Ink, fabric and thread on canvas
21¼ x 20⅞ in.
54 x 53 cm
SA0019
“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
José Samarago (Blindness)
For me, the point of departure for this project was Blindness by José Samarago...and then sometime soon after reading this book...the looting in South Africa happening....and I was like... I've watched this movie...
The theme of Darwin’s evolutionary drawings also became a touchstone for thoughts about the process of evolution in human society and actually watching and feeling the impact of the evolutionary process...
So these works are about time a space of change, a space where you can look back in history and look for into a future....and in many ways coming to a melancholy realisation that humans as a species have added nothing to the growth of the planet...and not too much in our own growth despite the attempts…
Sold
1043541
Miriro Mwandiambira
Unbroken Wedding Veil, 2018
2018 Fabric, weaves
218cm x 180cm
MM0004
$ 2,000.00 USD
Exhibited in Breaking Together
Breaking Together
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” Leonard Cohen, Anthem.
Life spares no one. It recognizes neither age, nor skin colour, nor gender. So as much as we suffer its blows individually, we do not suffer alone. And it is this connection, which transcends, sympathy, compassion and empathy, that not only unites us as humans but also is the thread that binds us together in times of grief and adversity, which instead of breaking us apart and destroying us,
enables us to emerge as a bigger more beautiful whole.
This is what lies at the core of the works in Breaking Together, the process and the outcome of pulling the pieces together, taking the discarded, the damaged and the disused and producing the undeniably beautiful, courageous and inspirational.
Mwandiambira both in performance and installation, forces our gaze to stay and examine not just her work and the way her materials speak through her work and interaction with it but the way we feel about those materials ourselves. While exploration of the narrative properties of common materials is a foundation of many contemporary art practices, in Mwandiambira’s work it assumes a distinctly feminine and conversational mode. Not only are the materials satins, silks, lace, weaves telling their stories
they are also in discussion among themselves, creating frictions and harmonies along the way. These conversations, while speaking to distinct and specific realities of contemporary life and conditionalities of a young woman living in Harare today, are equally resonant with the big questions shared by all – addressing polarities of beauty and ugliness, respect for tradition and rebellion, conformity and defiance, community and individual.
Emerging from turmoil, Breaking Together brings new ways to be whole.
Valerie Kabov Curator
Available
926435
Miriro Mwandiambira
Try to Adore me, no? (extract) documentation of performance , 2017
video documentation of performance
MM0002
$ 300.00 USD
Try to Adore Me, no? 2017 Harare
In Try to Adore Me, no? Mwandiambira brings into the public domain the intimate drama of a young woman drowning in social expectations ad peer group pressure. In the middle of a busy downtown street in Harare, we encounter a dramatised dysmorphic version of a young woman in front of a mirror in her bedroom, using every wrong material to achieve the impossible ideals of composure and beauty which are only genuinely available to an inanimate store mannequin. As it unfolds the performance also becomes an intervention and provocation to the public. Debates and discussions among onlookers ensure about what is happening and what is to be done about it, with some becoming angry and wanting to stop the performance and others defending her. From something personal the performance becomes an opportunity to reflect on the ability of a woman or any individual to assert and express themselves honestly in Zimbabwe today.
Available
926432
Miriro Mwandiambira
Sugar Embodiment (Lost in Translation) performance Genoa, Italy 2019, 2019
video documentation of performance
MM0001
$ 300.00 USD
Sugar Embodiment – Performance in Genoa 2019
Lost in Translation.
This performance transposes an experience of downtown Harare. While missing an actual port, Harare downtown is also a space of transit, exchange, congestion and trade. In this space of intense consumption and traffic, I situation the woman and the feminine as a participant but also one of the things that is objectified and consumed. A plastic mannequin worked in the performance become a symbolic object standing in for both the overwhelming flood of plastic and the humans both responsible for its production and consumption, which dehumanises them and their environment in the process. There are no ethics in the Darwinian survival of the fittest environment, where a woman’s default role is one of undefeated resilience in the face of overwhelming inevitabilities. The symbolic object then becomes the subject of the symbolic action of a futile attempt to cleanse it using all the wrong things recalling the myth of Sisyphus performing a task which only appears to have meaning and acquires meaning not through utility but through its endlessness, which is then interpreted as life. The sun starts setting.
Available
1043943
Anne Zanele Mutema
Motherese Statistician ex-facto Part 1, 2022
ink and embroidery on Fabriano paper
25cm x 35cm
AMU0017
$ 250.00 USD
Motherese Statistician
This work is a personalized data tracker of a continual constant determination, constant repetition but not a pattern. An aim of immortalizing memories. Memories created daily from an array of roles i play, an artist, a wife, a sister, a mother, myself, and the one i solely miss of being my mother’s daughter. The boxes are the memories’ capsules, safely stored inside kept from tempering. The patterns on the outside of the boxes are like codes or labels for the memories inside. I sewed the circles using freehand intentionally for it to bring out the continued soft determination of drawing a “the socially perfect” circle and straight line that shows my continued efforts in fulfilling my roles wholesomely. The work in it’s final state is a collection, culmination of and packaging of the converted data into memories, wholly.
Available
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