Amanda Mushate explores time with “Nguva ine Muridzi” exhibition
Last Saturday, arts enthusiasts converged at First Floor Art Gallery in Harare for Amanda Mushate’s second solo exhibition, Nguva ine Muridzi.
The 25-year-old artiste has establishing herself as a leading voice in contemporary Zimbabwean painting and an innovative young abstractionist with a growing international reputation.
As a young woman and a new mother, in a male dominated field Mushate is also a role model and an advocate for women artists making a career possible without sacrificing family.
Nguva ine Muridzi means ‘Time has its Master’ in Shona, a poignant statement about the issue of time and a valiant assertion from an artist who is addressing herself to agency and creative power amidst paradigm shifting circumstances and balancing career ambitions with traditional and personal imperatives.
The exhibition’s title suggests that time is not independent of an experience or interpretation of what took place, a matrix of narratives which can occupy the same space simultaneously and yet describe very different perspectives and understandings shared and unshared.
“If we look at the canvases in this dramatic new body of work, this voluminous complexity is inescapable,” said First Floor Gallery director Marcus Gora.
“Each work emerges as a symphonic orchestral composition with structural foundations built up through layers of colour, some dense, some translucent, creating an emotional landscape, through which different melodic lines emerge to articulate a multiplicity of voices and points of view, with fleeting moments of figuration floating in and out of view in the same way that in life we shift our focus on people and relationships even as we share the same space and time.
“These works are not a contemplative conversation with the canvas, they are entirely immersive environments, compelling the viewer to move in and through the work, shift a perspective and feeling of where and how we feel, see and experience our life.”
Nguve ine Muridzi is an immersive experience, which challenges people to stop and engage with the time of their own lives in its complex, fluctuating and dramatic beauty and to own it. It is a testament to personal courage of the artist and an invocation for everyone to at least try the same.
