Inside /out

Catinca Tabacaru is proud to present Admire Kamudzengerere: Inside /out, opening Saturday, April 13, 2019, 6-8pm. This will be the Zimbabwe-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and the gallery’s final installation at our 250 Broome Street location before relocating.

The exhibition will include new monotype, silkscreen and litho portraits on paper, and a dominant 2013 painting portraying the rape of the artist, and signaling the artist’s focus on the repetitive nature of history.

CTG: This artist’s voice is more relevant than ever as we watch Zimbabwe burn with political chaos. The work embodies all the angst, power and hope of a country struggling for its right to democracy.

AK: Drawing being decisively male, as a black artist, I find visual language racist, explicitly aggressive, and violent. My artistic dilemma is how to engage the veins of unconsciousness in visual poetry and transfer them to a language of prose. I attempt to adopt feminist tactics, finding order and sanity. To draw in the dark such that I cannot see my own line and cannot change nor scrap anything.

CTG: Kamudzengerere’s marks live between control and chaos. They are instinctual, emotional, fast and free. They come from growing up in a continuously changing Zimbabwe, where there was, and still is, deep frustration with dreams gone wrong and politics gone violent. The only constant is the feeling of being unsure.

AK: I am a chess player and the game is my looking glass; a mirror for the way society sees itself. Painting becomes a process of transforming pawns into mightier elements of influence, of colour. Over the years, this process has become a tougher, better opponent.

When you play a chess board, each piece has a position. In Zimbabwe in 2018, each actor played a role – the judges, the military, the politicians, the voters. It is only during these elections that brothers turned against brothers.

I play from the inside out. My subconscious is the undisputed opponent – a project manager mirroring my moves into a life of their own. The repetitive nature of this battle on canvas becomes the springboard that frees my imagination and creates opportunities for accident and grace to influence the finished picture.

All work for Inside /out was produced with the support of Aga Lab Amsterdam as part of Admire Kamudzengerere’s 2019 artist residency.