Now living in the UK, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami was born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993 and lived in South Africa from the ages of nine to seventeen. Her work reveals a deeply personal vision of Southern African life. Drawing on her experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement, her paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources such as online images and personal photographs, which collapse past and present Many of her paintings feature self-portraits and images of her immediate and extended family.
Speaking about her work the artist says, “With the collapsing of geography and time and space, no longer am I confined in a singular society but simultaneously I am experiencing Zimbabwe and South Africa and the UK, in my mind. I’m in the UK, but I carry those places with me everywhere I go.”
She was included in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, her first solo institutional exhibition was held at Gasworks, London, also in 2019, and in 2020 she featured in the Victoria Miro group exhibition I See You. Other group exhibitions include Dreaming of Home, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Indigo Waves & Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reframed: The Woman at the Window at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; and When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, curated by Koyo Kouoh, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Hwami’s work is held in public collections including Government Art Collection, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kadist Foundation, Paris; Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Jorge Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa.
[excerpted from Victoria Miro website: www.victoria-miro.com]
