Portia Zvavahera - by Tamar Garb & Sinazo Chiya & Tandazani Dhlakama & Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela & Fiona Bradley & Andrew Nairne (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Portia Zvavahera of Zimbabwe is one of the outstanding artists of her generation. This book contains a selection of striking images and large details, capturing her unique techniques. Published to accompany exhibitions at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 22 October 2024 - 16 February 2025 and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 1 March - 25 May 2025.

Portia Zvavahera is one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a unique combination of print/painting techniques to register a private world of dreams, fantasies and figural constructions. She received her art education in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, and has become recognized in the past decade as one of the foremost representatives of African figuration, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and in a number of commercial gallery exhibitions in South Africa, the US and the UK. She has not yet had a solo show in a public museum in Europe.

This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera's practice. The focus will be on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and large details will highlight Zvavahera's innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques that build rich surfaces to create her private cosmology of creatures and contexts.

The book will feature a significant new essay from curator Tamar Garb and will center around an extensive conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discussing Zvavahera's engagement with eros, intimacy and female-centered experience.

The book will open up how Zvavahera's works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

About the Author

Professor Tamar Garb is Durning Professor in the History of Art at UCL. She has published widely on questions of gender and sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Art as well as on photography from Africa, the work of women artists and feminist aesthetics. Her curatorial practice includes Gauguin: Maker of Myth, Tate, London 2011, Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, V&A, London 2011, Conversations in Letters & Lines: William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh 2016, and Beyond the Binary: Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt, Walther Coll. 2023. Sinazo Chiya is a writer and associate director at Stevenson, based in Cape Town. She is among the 2019 writing fellows at the Institute of Creative Arts at UCT. She is the editor of Mawande Ka Zenzile's monograph, Uhambo luyazilawula and has contributed texts to publications by Penny Siopis and Dada Khanyisa. In 2018 Chiya published 9 More Weeks, a book of artist interviews and has previously written for Art Africa, Artthrob, Adjective and the Center for Curating the Archive. Tandazani Dhlakama, is curator at Zeitz MOCAA. She joined the museum in 2017 and has been involved in the Zeitz MOCAA Centre for Art Education as Education Manager with special focus on public programming and tertiary engagement. She recently curated Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at El Espacio 23 (2020), Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era (2018) and co-curated Nobukho Nqaba's Izicwangciso Zezethu... (2019) at Zeitz MOCAA. Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela holds the South African National Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Her work focuses on exploring ways in which the impact of that oppression and violence across generations in the aftermath of historical trauma and the relationship between remorse and forgiveness. Her recent honors include: fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe; Honorary Doctor of Laws from Rhodes University (2019), and since 2017, she has been Research Advisor and Global Scholar at Queen's University, Belfast.