Asiimov Baker attended the opening of gadzi, Tate’s Infinities Commission 2026 – a night of desert light and hallucinatory sound.
Opening night of Zimbabwean artist nora chipaumire’s gadzi. My friend Sylvie was waiting for me, and we descended into the concrete bowels of the Tate Modern, which was already teeming with visitors. I knew I was in good company based on the number of compliments I received on my black-and-white polka-dot scarf. Yes, I agree it looks formal without being pretentious.
As part of the second annual Infinities Commission, chipaumire has taken over the gallery’s East Tank. The space is bathed in the golden dusk of the desert, an effect intensified by the huge boulders punctuating the landscape. Huge speakers enclosed in wooden boxes and prodigious stones balance uncannily atop each other, stacked and stretching towards the ceiling. I smacked one of these formations with my fist, producing a hollow sound. Sylvie marched around the great rock and the look in her eyes called me over. We peered into its insides, a skeleton of timber and rebar illuminated by lamps housed in PVC water containers. All the boulders here – fabricated so realistically – put up a similarly deceptive front. In chipaumire’s words, however, “what is artificial to one human being may be reality to another.”
A crowd had converged around the centre of the space, gravitationally pulled by what was happening in the middle. Sylvie and I headed to the back, where a rocky platform provided a viewing vantage. I could see expectation, thrill, and a bit of anxiety in the faces around me as strange, hallucinatory sounds began issuing from the synth player at the centre of the room. It felt like staring up at a clear night sky. A saxophonist walked through the crowd and percussion shuffled into the air, softly at first but rising to the pitch of a swarm of cicadas. The place has wild acoustics. Sylvie and I stared at each other in awe as the room transformed around us. (The artist later told me that a whole world exists in different frequencies and temporalities – which was unravelling right before our eyes.) The artifice of the set pieces was temporarily replaced by something solid and ancient. We were suddenly among the balancing rocks of Zimbabwe and it was earth, not cardboard, beneath our feet. The huge speakers were a spectacular collision of the primordial with the modern. It all had the verve of what Pink Floyd did in Pompeii; wiring, mic-ing, and amp-ing up a sacred site for sacred purposes.
Brian Wilson once said that music is the voice of god. If music is the voice, chipaumire believes, then the body that creates it is divinity itself. “We embody that voice. Everything we make with our bodies, activates and animates god.” The show’s name comes from the legends of the Shona people. gadziguru is the mother of god, the spirit of creation and regeneration, the femininity in nature, and a symbol of something everlastingly resilient. In the absence of this musical ceremony, the speakers will usually rumble with the deep approach of chimurenga, both a revolution and the popular Zimbabwean musical genre that characterises it. The artist encourages you to interact with the rocks, touch the speakers, sit on them, hold your face inches from them, and feel how god was heard through the rocks of Zimbabwe. Layers of electronics, percussion, and sax accumulated into an ecstatic crescendo. The ground soared beneath our feet, closing the distance between the earth and the sky. In a powerful voice which cut through the cacophony, chipaumire chanted at a troupe of dancers who whirled and thrashed as if around a bonfire.
“While studying architecture, we learnt that the fire is the original living room, that’s where people in camps and communities used to gather,” Sylvie spoke in my ear, trying to transmit her voice over the music. I guess fireplaces have been such a fixture in living rooms for a reason. There’s a certain domesticity to this show; we feel right at home in the space. I still think of the couple I spotted laying together on the rocky platform behind us, eyes closed to an expression of bliss.
Everything suddenly went quiet. Tense as a string, the silence occasionally twanged into sorrowful life. Guitar melodies, drenched in chorus and reverb like a tear-soaked tissue, rang out into the night like lost signals. The saxophonist began responding to these pleas with his instrument, blowing bitter beseechings after the guitar. I felt a helpless miscommunication in this duet, two entities trying to speak but missing each other’s replies. Every now and again when their melodies overlapped and harmonised, a desperation crept into both instruments, their notes harsh and harrowing. This whole installation and the accompanying performances are anti-colonial in a way both subtle and stark. It doesn’t shy away from the tragedy of history but neither is it fatalistic about the loss of the colonised. It’s a celebration of how traditions manifests when the world around them changes unrecognisably. Electrified rituals amplified through beefy sound systems. Chipaumire remembers being among a select few artists during the late nineties whose work was concerned with colonialism. “But now it’s fashionable,” she says. “Historical issues and crimes are coming to the foreground of many artists; that is good. But, you know, one is always wary of the sincerity of it all. For those of us who are a product of the empire, these are real life and ongoing concerns, not a trend to get funding.”
A cataclysmic applause ensued at the end of the performance and the crowd began dispersing out into the hall where a DJ set was happening. Sylvie and I walked around scrutinising the installation. New details kept making themselves known to us with each pass; images projected inside the rocks, vague figures shaped out of steel wires, mysterious silhouettes emerging out of form…
nora chipaumire’s gadzi exists in the hazy regions between the concrete and abstract, because so does the natural world itself. It’s holistic; singular but also many things at once. With elements of theatre, dance, sound, and fabrication, this work spans disciplines in the way communities span borders. The piece serves as a manifesto for intuition, to feel how things are bound up in each other. Take music for example, so tangled up in the continuum of our lives that listening to a song is akin to travelling through space and/or time. Which is why the artist wants you to “listen with your heart, lead with it, and the rest of the organism will follow.” Not too dissimilar from the words of Funkadelic,
free your mind
and your ass will follow
the kingdom of heaven is within.
