Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami opens her first institutional solo exhibition today at Gasworks. Drawing on personal experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement, her intensely pigmented paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources such as online images and haunting family photographs, which collapse past and present into bold afro-futuristic visions. Having represented Zimbabwe at the Venice Biennale this year (at Elephant we picked her out as one of the female artists to watch at the time), she presents a new, ambitious body of work that continues her personal reflection on uprooting and re-grounding. Bold and tender, Hwami’s work interweaves memory, testimony, imagination and the political longing for a truer world.
