Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Tashinga Majiri
Rudo Rwunouya Nemabasa (Love comes with work)
First Floor Gallery Harare (Harare)
Rudo Rwunouya Nemabasa (Love comes with work)
First Floor Gallery Harare (Harare)
In history of art, husband and wife artist couples are rare but not uncommon. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Marina Abramovic and Ulay and in our own Zimbabwean context Locardia and Joseph Nandarika, Portia Zvavahera and Gideon Gono, as well as Gina Maxim and Misheck Masamvu. Individual careers of the members of the couples are often celebrated individually and often retrospectively. It is less common for the two artists and two partners to allow audiences into their personal and creative conversation as part of a dynamic contemporaneous experience. So it is a unique privilege for audiences, when such a couple shares publicly an insight into their process and to creates a space to see their works as both distinct but emotionally and intellectually intertwined practices. This is the privileged space created by Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Tashinga Majiri in Rudo Rwunuya Nemabasa.
It is no coincidence that the notion of effort and time is built into the title, as it is also built into the names of the artists Shingirai – Persevere, Tashinga – We have persevered. Layered into the title is also the notion of there being no true accidents in life, relationships or in art and there is no better foundation for the lessons in life than family. For each artist, personal and creative evolution is synchronous, their growth as artists, partners and parents.
Rudo Rwunuya Nebasa is both an invocation and a reflection of their learning as young people, young artists and young parents. The assumption of responsibility for everything you are and everything you love is all a celebration, a drama and a mountain to climb. For each of the partners the process is formulated and expressed differently but starting from a shared foundation.
For Mushate, the drama of “becoming” is layered with processing memories and traumas of her past, projections of the future and the turbulence and complexity of the present. Her infinite lines and colour layers with allusions to figuration floating in an out, constantly challenge us to find order and beauty in relentlessly shifting space and time. The painful beauty of a mother’s love, cognaisant of all that life is and the limits of her power to shield and prepare one’s child from all that life is.
For Majiri, ‘becoming’ is metaphorised through fecundity of nature and plant life in particular, something that has been obsessively his preoccupation as an artist. The notion of growth and seeing himself as somebody evolving, expanding in reach and power is placed under a microscope without fear or favour. There is beauty and aggression, which seeks to be understood but also harnessed through relationships and through art.
What is shared in this conversation is relentlessness of commitment, the poetry and the musicality of the line and movement, which permeate the works of each painter with their own visceral dynamism. Where there is love there is work, where there is the love of work and the work of love, there is life. In positing that, Rudo Rwunuya Nemabasa suggests implicitly that the title is also synonymous with the name of Mushate and Majiri’s young daughter, Thandeka – One who is loved.
Valerie Kabov
©2023
It is no coincidence that the notion of effort and time is built into the title, as it is also built into the names of the artists Shingirai – Persevere, Tashinga – We have persevered. Layered into the title is also the notion of there being no true accidents in life, relationships or in art and there is no better foundation for the lessons in life than family. For each artist, personal and creative evolution is synchronous, their growth as artists, partners and parents.
Rudo Rwunuya Nebasa is both an invocation and a reflection of their learning as young people, young artists and young parents. The assumption of responsibility for everything you are and everything you love is all a celebration, a drama and a mountain to climb. For each of the partners the process is formulated and expressed differently but starting from a shared foundation.
For Mushate, the drama of “becoming” is layered with processing memories and traumas of her past, projections of the future and the turbulence and complexity of the present. Her infinite lines and colour layers with allusions to figuration floating in an out, constantly challenge us to find order and beauty in relentlessly shifting space and time. The painful beauty of a mother’s love, cognaisant of all that life is and the limits of her power to shield and prepare one’s child from all that life is.
For Majiri, ‘becoming’ is metaphorised through fecundity of nature and plant life in particular, something that has been obsessively his preoccupation as an artist. The notion of growth and seeing himself as somebody evolving, expanding in reach and power is placed under a microscope without fear or favour. There is beauty and aggression, which seeks to be understood but also harnessed through relationships and through art.
What is shared in this conversation is relentlessness of commitment, the poetry and the musicality of the line and movement, which permeate the works of each painter with their own visceral dynamism. Where there is love there is work, where there is the love of work and the work of love, there is life. In positing that, Rudo Rwunuya Nemabasa suggests implicitly that the title is also synonymous with the name of Mushate and Majiri’s young daughter, Thandeka – One who is loved.
Valerie Kabov
©2023
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