Terrence Musekiwa
Silk, 2019

This body of work clearly defines a new direction for the 28-year old Zimbabwean artist. While incorporating stone heads, carved in the traditional Shona techniques Musekiwa has been mastering since the age of 5, these new works are made primarily with raw silk thickly woven into vibrant plumes. The familiar toiling of stone, a reductive process, is mirrored with the equally laborious sowing of the silk. The resulting visual and textural contrast begets tension-filled relationships between masculine and feminine pursuits.

These works create dense environments susceptible to change with each installation. The acceptance of chance as a factor of form allows the works to exist on their own terms, morphing as their organic counterparts might do in nature.

The colors of the silks are attributed symbolic meanings. As an example, in Ubuntu and the Earth, land matters on the African Continent are addressed by referring to the black silk as metaphor for Black Zimbabweans, while the brown color references the country’s red soil, which is rich in minerals and beneficial for agriculture. Zimbabwe was once knowns as the breadbasket of Africa and the hope stands that it may return to this grandeur as the Bglack majority on the Continent continues to take back its land from former colonial rulers.

In One Mind and Inflence, Musekiwa reflects on the foreign influences eroding traditional Zimbabwean practices. As diverse ideas enter everyday life through technology, travel, and business, a younger generation of Zimbabweans loses touch with elements of traditional culture. Musekiwa considers here how our discrete cultural backgrounds shape what we see. For him, a Zimbabwean who grew up in a pre-internet era surrounded by ancestral beliefs, the green color of silk represents life, the yellow is light, black is power, and white is peace. But how does a viewers see the meanings in these colors? Where do we overlap, and where do our discrete cultural backgrounds create gaps in our understanding of one another’s ways of seeing?