Rachel Monosov and Admire Kamudzengerere
1972, 2017

A work of performance and photography, 1972 offers an archive of images and text documenting the imagined interracial marriage of a Jewish woman and a Zimbabwean man in rural Zimbabwe in 1972. In reality, 1972 was a tumultuous year in Zimbabwe, as a guerrilla-style war of independence escalated and the intermingling of the races was challenged and driven underground by social pressures and government intervention. Together, the photographs and cards, rendered in a style drawn from the past, attest to an intimate personal and domestic narrative, a story “both believable and unbelievable at the same time,” says Monosov. The black and white prints also serve as photographic self-portraits, as in the course of their creation the artists married, lived together, and built a house in Zimbabwe.

“1972 is complex and visually acute. It asks us to think about the interaction of words and photographic images, whether in a photo album, a newspaper, or an archive. We’re extremely excited to bring it into the Block’s collection, where it will be seen in juxtaposition to the extraordinary collection of early and mid-20th-century photographs and photo albums in the collection of the University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.”
— Kathleen Bickford Berzock, the Block’s Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs.

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EXHIBITIONS
2018 Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York (solo)
2018 CCAC, Portland, USA; Curator: Modou Dieng
2018 The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare
2018 National Museum of Art, Bucharest, Romania
2019 Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, USA; Curator: Catinca Tabacaru with co-curators Rehema Barber & Michael Schuetz (solo)
2019 Permanent Collections Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago; Curators: Antawan Byrd & Matthew Witkovsky
2020 Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evenston, Illinois; Curator: Kathleen Bickford Berzock (upcoming)