MBARE Art Space will today at 4pm unveil Kushambidzwa: Lines of Discomfort, a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Lomedy Mhako.
In this latest body of work, he works across installation, object-based practice and spatial intervention, and uses domestic materials he refers to as rurimi rwamai (mother’s tongue).
Chairs, pegs, brooms and everyday tools are reorganised into deliberate forms that speak to labour, power, care and survival.
In this reconfiguration, familiar objects lose their comfort, revealing the weight of the systems they quietly uphold.
According to the exhibition curator Tafadzwa “Mbalizwey” Mushayi, the exhibition draws inspiration from kushambidzwa, a cleansing ritual in Shona culture and reframes this tradition not as erasure, but as confrontation.
“It centres on a difficult, but necessary premise: before meaningful change can occur, there must be an honest acknowledgement of what is broken within our social, political and economic realities,” read part of a Press statement released earlier this week.
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“Rather than washing away discomfort, Mhako invites viewers to sit with it, to recognise the fractures embedded within everyday systems.”
Mhako told NewsDay Life & Style: “My practice is centred around ordinary maginalised communities and I regard myself as a producer of happenings whose objective is to reflect the times we are living in, which I believe are very desperate and one can’t help but get involved.
“Our vocabulary is much limited, therefore, we adopt materials to help to articulate what words can’t.
“It’s because of these materials that we’re able to express our concerns about the global crises and instil urgency in our current situation as a country.”
A self-taught artist, Mhako has served as an artist-in-residence at Mbare Art Space for the past year.
“The space has given me much to think about in regards to what it is to be an orator and reflector of our times,” he shared.
“The time spent at the space has shaped not only my narration but the means to tell these happenings of our time.”
The exhibition coincides with a visit by design students from Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography (South Africa), opening dialogue between art and design, not merely as solution-making disciplines, but as critical frameworks for exposing and reimagining the structures that shape our lives.
The academy is visiting the space for the third time.
Responding to the upcoming visit, Mbare Art Space founder Moffat Takadiwa said the art space ran almost parallel to academic institutions and other formal art institutions.
“We are generating a point of convergence between different ways of creating knowledge.
“We have been doing international collaborations mostly with academic institutions as they are an important part of the art ecosystem,” he said.
“Mhako has gone beyond his comfort zone and explores what lines can do,” Takadiwa said.
He added that showcasing Mhako’s exhibition while the students from Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography were visiting was actually a strategic move, further highlighted by the presence of the show’s curator, (Mushayi), a former student at Uncommon.org, an organisation that operates community-powered innovation hubs and is housed within Mbare Art Space.
She has assisted in curating one show and Kushambidzwa: Lines of Discomfort is her first solo show as much as it is a first for Mhako.
“The everyday culture depends so much on design.
“African economies can actually be driven by design because it is very important when it comes to the culture of making things.
“You can’t make anything before there is a design,” Takadiwa emphasised.