Troy Makaza
Kufa Izuva Rimwe
First Floor Gallery Harare
Kufa Izuva Rimwe
First Floor Gallery Harare
Kufa IzuvaRimwe, means death is but a day. It is perhaps the most poetic and life affirming proverb openings in ChiShona. While the proverb continues with a caution that problems take a long time to build us and no outcome happens on its own, it is valuable to just reflect on the idea that death is just a moment and rest there. Because when we do consider that death is just a moment, we immediately realise that life is far more than that. That in fact Kufa izuvarimwe is the flipside to the concept of hupenyu which means infuses the idea of life with the blessing of being alive, in and of itself.
So there is no necessary conflict or contrast between the joy of a good meal, the pain of war and poverty, celebration of a new birth or the Moon landing. There is no superior civilization, there is no better culture, there is nothing more human than being human. I remember taking my husband to Le Louvre for the first time many years ago, expecting a euphoric reaction to the pathos and spectacle of the grandest museum, the palace and home of Mona Lisa and treasures of Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Mesopotamia. His response stunningly concise was ‘To think they built all this and they did not know how to treat other human beings’. It was not a rejection of beauty but seeing it in totality and a totality which included himself, explicitly and undeniably. It is at this crossroads of self-awareness and self-acceptance and recentering the world for all that we find Troy Makaza’s Kufa IzuvaRimwe.
Kufa IzuvaRimwe is a body of work, which looks at life as it is lived rather than imagined. Life, with inequality and class, with history of oppression, with the present of poverty and drugs and corruption, with politics diving people and land, with maps of a continent carving out scars of dispossession and inherited trauma, where answers are neither clear nor close at hand. These new works, assert and vanquish any doubt that there is a need for compromise between painfully serious and deliciously seductive, that do be significant and important art needs to become devoid of joy and beauty, that concept, context and the sublime cannot sing in unison.
InKufa IzuvaRimwe, Makaza brings us a heartfelt invocation to himself and others, to hear and see themselves in history as part of history, to see everything we are and what we live with honesty, with passionate love for being alive. A life infinitely imperfect, infinitely and imperfectly beautiful and infinitely hopeful and optimistic.
Valerie Kabov
Curator
©2022
So there is no necessary conflict or contrast between the joy of a good meal, the pain of war and poverty, celebration of a new birth or the Moon landing. There is no superior civilization, there is no better culture, there is nothing more human than being human. I remember taking my husband to Le Louvre for the first time many years ago, expecting a euphoric reaction to the pathos and spectacle of the grandest museum, the palace and home of Mona Lisa and treasures of Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Mesopotamia. His response stunningly concise was ‘To think they built all this and they did not know how to treat other human beings’. It was not a rejection of beauty but seeing it in totality and a totality which included himself, explicitly and undeniably. It is at this crossroads of self-awareness and self-acceptance and recentering the world for all that we find Troy Makaza’s Kufa IzuvaRimwe.
Kufa IzuvaRimwe is a body of work, which looks at life as it is lived rather than imagined. Life, with inequality and class, with history of oppression, with the present of poverty and drugs and corruption, with politics diving people and land, with maps of a continent carving out scars of dispossession and inherited trauma, where answers are neither clear nor close at hand. These new works, assert and vanquish any doubt that there is a need for compromise between painfully serious and deliciously seductive, that do be significant and important art needs to become devoid of joy and beauty, that concept, context and the sublime cannot sing in unison.
InKufa IzuvaRimwe, Makaza brings us a heartfelt invocation to himself and others, to hear and see themselves in history as part of history, to see everything we are and what we live with honesty, with passionate love for being alive. A life infinitely imperfect, infinitely and imperfectly beautiful and infinitely hopeful and optimistic.
Valerie Kabov
Curator
©2022
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