Admire Kamudzengerere
Post-Its

Kamudzengerere grew up under a Zimbabwean government which systematically turned off the capital city’s power grid for 10 minutes to 23 hours at a time. Upon returning to Zimbabwe in late 2013 from the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, Kamudzengerere built himself a studio within his homestead. During those following years, he taughts at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe School of Art during the day, and spent his nights in his studio. The power outages would cause frequent interruptions, and one night, in the middle of a particularly creative moment, he creatively adjusted to the circumstances.

He lit a candle and reached for a stack of post-it notes and a small ink stone. The miniature size of the yellow surface could be illuminated by the small light source. Kamudzengerere made hundreds of portraits on Post-its over the following months. In their multitude, the portraits became representative of the community around him; the friends and strangers he passed by on the street each day, each with his or her own story and life lived.

A work made of 365 Post-Its was first shown in the 2016 Zig Zag Zim exhibition the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. The show was curated by Catinca Tabacaru who had been invited by Raphael Chikukwa to bring together the works by members of the CTG Collective who had been working at the nearby Dzimbanhete Arts & Culture Interactions center the year prior.

These hundreds-strong works continued to evolve in multitude and color, and were exhibited in Kamudzengerere’s first New York solo show at the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in 2017, and later that year in the Zimbabwe Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2019, a similar work was exhibited at the Cairo Biennale, and that summer, Kamudzengerere made the largest Post-It piece to date during the CTG Collective’s stint at the Serlachius Museums in Mänttä, Finland.