Sammy Loren visits Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People, an ambitious exhibition that traces the hidden diplomatic threads binding Romania and Zimbabwe and proposes what a truly transnational canon might look like.
Back in 2020, Raphael Guilbert was filing visas for an upcoming show when she discovered a peculiar diplomatic quirk.
The British-American curator directs Catinca Tabacaru, a Bucharest-based gallery with a project space outside Harare and a roster of many Zimbabwean artists. Guilbert assumed that securing the Zimbabweans’ visas would include sending documents through the nearest Romanian consular offices, likely with the other European Union states in South Africa. Yet Guilbert soon understood that Romania’s embassy was much closer than anyone would have expected.
“The Romanians maintain an embassy right in Harare,” Guilbert explains. “Normally, embassies have big staffs, but the Romanian embassy there is just the single ambassador in this one building. It seemed weird, so I started looking into it.” Guilbert’s curiosity eventually led her into the archival labyrinth of one of Zimbabwe’s oldest dailies, The Herald, where she unearthed dusty newspaper clippings detailing one of the Cold War’s most obscure alliances. In the early seventies, Romania’s Communist regime secretly bankrolled Zimbabwe’s liberation movement. Romania’s support—cash, weapons, and training—played a decisive role in ending Rhodesian apartheid and helped restore majority rule to Zimbabwe.
“I’m a digger,” Guilbert says. Her research anchors Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People, the ambitious exhibition now on view at Catinca Tabacaru’s Bucharest headquarters. The show features sixty-eight artists—half of whom are Romanian, and the other half Zimbabwean—and investigates not only the two countries’ original clandestine political romance, but the uncanny similarities between artists working in post-communist and post-colonial contexts. At a moment when curators are grappling with whose stories get told and how to build truly global collections, this exhibition impressed me by how it moves beyond performative gestures to reimagine whose artistic traditions are placed in conversation and what a truly transnational canon demands.
Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People unfolds across multiple spaces in Bucharest. The main body of work lives inside Tabacaru’s gallery on the third floor of a former train factory. Installations take over the entrance—photography salon-style on one wall, paintings hung on another, sculptures atop a bed of cinder blocks—while Guilbert’s archival research is displayed in a separate room. Touring the show, one senses the rich thematic threads tying together artists from wildly different societies.
Romanian conceptual artist Decebal Scriba’s self-portrait Mask #2 (1976) is a triptych of photographs. In the first image, the artist faces the camera, his face wrapped in a nest of wires pressing into his flesh. In the second profile photo, we see how the wires bind his entire skull. The third photo reveals Scriba stoically staring into the camera again. This time, though, the wires are gone; only their marks crisscross his nose, forehead, and cheeks. Mask #2 is conceptual and performative, evoking a prisoner’s mugshot as much as a passport photo. It suggests that in a repressive atmosphere, the state may muzzle artists, but artists end up muzzling themselves, too.
Mirroring Scriba’s works is Zimbabwean artist Admire Kamudzengerere and photographer Rachel Monosov’s 1972. The series of twenty-three photographs documents the love story of a white woman marrying a Black Zimbabwean, having children, and vacationing together—all acts outlawed in former Rhodesia. Kamudzengerere and Monosov mix reality with an alternative history. Indeed, the artists did meet in Zimbabwe and really did shoot their marriage, documenting their real-life affair. By mixing documentary and performance, 1972 creates an alternate history and the imaginative space for an alternate future.
It makes sense that within these repressive environments photographers took their work in a performative direction, a space where expression—however fleeting—felt possible.
If the photography leverages performance to subversive ends, the show’s sculptures play with form and allegory to confront their respective histories. Josiah Manzi’s eerie, serpentine stone sculptures are alienesque with bulging foreheads and squeezed faces, as if smashed from a vice. Fanizani Akuda’s stone works look like cute, cuddly pets, but are actually mischievous, spectral creatures. Bernard Matemera and Amon Mwareka produced pieces of a darker register. Matemera’s Untitled (1960) is a man transforming into a hippo, and Mwareka’s Untitled (1971) is ghost-like, with empty eyes and broken teeth. The artists produced these pieces using traditional Zimbabwean materials and techniques, all while living under the racist Rhodesian system that relegated them second-class citizens. This complex history sharpens the works’ poetry and universal message about being human in an inhumane world.
Setting these works beside the unsettling and erotic efforts of Romanian sculptors deepens and complicates their respective meanings. In the glazed porcelain series Untitled (Lenin Zombies) (2025), Ciprian Mureşan disfigures the father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, melting the man down and chopping him up—along with the many myths surrounding him. Nona Inescu’s Introvert (Small) v.3-2 (2023) is part weapon, part kinky sex toy, part dog leash. Placing these works beside the Zimbabwean ones sparks an enigmatic conversation about power, pleasure, and history, how they’re pursued, and how they’re controlled.
Due to the exhibition’s historical roots, along its never-before-seen archival documentation, it’s tempting to reduce it all to a survey of post-communist and post-colonial artists. Tabacaru, however, resists any easy narratives by including as part of the main show a series of talks, screenings and symposiums. Over two days in November at Point in central Bucharest, dozens of artists, historians, curators and writers gathered to discuss Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People, what it reveals about the past and what it illuminates about our present and future.
Like the exhibition itself, these discussions challenge whose stories get told and disrupt many assumptions. Through them, we learn that Romania wasn’t just another Soviet stooge, but that under its nationalistic ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu, the country pursued its own independent foreign policy, hence why it supported the Zimbabwean rebels in the first place. Zimbabwean artist Admire Kamudzengerere Zoomed in and reconnected for the first time in years with his ex-wife, Rachel Monosov. Both reiterated the goals of bringing personal, untold histories into international discourses.
Perhaps no one expressed these sentiments better than Paris-based critic Simon Njami, who flew in to participate in the symposium. During his lecture, Njami summed up the urgent message beating at the heart of Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People. “There’s a great deal of the dialogue between artists that we miss because it’s silence,” Njami explained. “And this exhibition invites you to silence.” The quiet Njami describes isn’t absence. Far from it. It’s actually the resonance that surfaces when artists communicate across seemingly vast chasms.
