THE VIEW

In his celebrated exhibition, ‘Vestiges Of Colonialism’, Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa proffers a cure for the hangover of this country’s history

In April 2024, for the seventh year in a row, Zimbabwe will send a talented contingent to the world’s oldest art show: the Venice Biennale. The month-long exhibit, established in 1895, is renowned for catapulting artists onto the global art stage. Six Zimbabweans — Troy Makaza Gillian Rosselli, Sekai Machache, Moffat Takadiwa, Kombo Chapfika, Victor Nyakauru and Moffat Tkadiwa — have been selected to showcase their work at Zimbabwe’s pavilion at the Biennale: a feather in each of their caps, and a vibrant plume in our country’s headdress.

Of the mix, Moffat Takadiwa, born in Karoi in 1983, has fascinated me for some time. I had seen his name when Jay-Z and Beyoncé started collecting his work — an admittedly vapid introduction that I was looking to deepen. So, when I heard that he was holding a solo exhibition, “Vestiges Of Colonialism”, at Harare’s National Gallery this year, I was giddy with excitement. I knew Takadiwa recycled everyday waste in elaborate ways, but I wasn’t ready for the work’s visceral nature when I came face-to-face with it: right away I was struck by its expansiveness.

The National Gallery — opened by the Queen Mother in 1957 and itself a colonial remnant — is a sublime building in the capital’s business district. It couldn’t have been a better home for Takadiwa’s exhibit, which he put together with Fadzai Muchemwa, the curator of both the National Gallery and Zimbabwe’s pavilion at the Biennale. The gallery’s high ceiling is made from a semitransparent material that fills the vast space with an unrelenting light that bounced off the exhibit’s floor centerpiece, “Walk Of Shame”. The artwork — a huge 30ft square filled with old green, pink, blue and purple toothbrush handles arranged as a Star Of David — is a poignant reminder that settler colonialism is alive and well today. This exhibition was a conversation not just about history, but also about the present.

Hung on the main gallery walls were large, dark tapestries made from plastic computer keys, toothbrush heads and pen refills, all woven together with fishing line. These tapestries, perhaps the best-known of Takadiwa’s style, have caught the attention of galleries and collectors around the world. Indeed, shortly after “Vestiges Of Colonialism” opened in Harare, Takadiwa travelled to Paris for a symposium at the Louvre and a solo exhibition at the city’s Semiose Gallery.

Takadiwa calls this series “Korekore Handwriting”, acknowledgment of the influence of Zimbabwe’s Korekore people - who use the collective labour of many craftspeople to make their famous woven products — on his work. Takadiwa builds his pieces at the Mbare Art Space, a workshop he helped to establish in the Harare suburb, where he gets help from, and mentors, other Zimbabwean artists. Together with his team of over 30 people, Takadiwa retrieves everyday objects, such as bottle tops, toothbrushes, computer keys, plastic tubes and pen refills, from rubbish dumps around Harare. The items are sorted and cleaned before being meticulously woven together to make objects imbued with renewed symbolism. It is a tedious process, a decolonial alchemy of sorts.

Above: ‘Korekore Handwriting’ is a tapestry of disused everyday objects, such as old computer keys and toothbrush heads, woven together by Moffat Takadiwa and his team at Mbare Art Space in Harare

Takadiwa’s work, he says: “confronts the colonial hangover using everyday consumer residue”. His thesis goes something like this: the debris of capitalism and colonialism infects our daily lives — every year, more than 29 billion toothbrushes are thrown out around the world. And while modern toothbrushes only became popular in the 20th century, dental care isn’t going away anytime soon. We are amidst a reckoning with modernity and so we must build something new: something born of the remnants that both critiques and transforms them.

Art as colonial resistance helps us imagine new worlds free from domination. Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga describes this power in her own artform: “Weaving of words — and through this process, reweaving time, action and reaction into a new whole - makes writing back against empire a site of potential healing.” Takadiwa’s own weaving envisions what that complex but capacious world could look like. The work asserts hybridity: the (somewhat controversial) idea that there is no going back to an idyllic, pre-colonial moment where the land and people are untouched by empire. Hybridity recognises that no such utopia exists — we will always live in a world that was ravaged by empire, where coloniser and colonised are in constant negotiation.

In the upstairs gallery at Takadiwa’s exhibition I was transported back to my childhood as I explored a large area devoted to an intricate web of old videotape. I recalled the boxes of defunct VHS tapes that would pile up in the back room of my family’s video rental shop in Avondale. After our business shut down, we tried donating the old tapes, but no one was interested in these seemingly useless plastic objects. As a kid, I was allowed to unspool a tape or two for fun. I would pull the shiny brown ribbon out from the back of the cassette, wrap it around my body and prance around pretending to be royalty before stuffing it in the rubbish bin.

But instead of relegating this magnetic videotape to the bin, Takadiwa fashioned it into an interactive space, rather like a maze, that visitors could enter and explore. At first, I was reticent to push aside the shimmering curtains, worried about disturbing the art that I wasn’t allowed to touch. Once I was inside, I realised that this was the point: we were supposed to get stuck in the maze, to feel uncomfortable in its complexity and in our own inextricable complicity in colonialism and its modern reincarnation, capitalism.

From first slide: ‘Same Old Song’ (2022/3); Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa; ‘Rugare Kwamuri’ (2023)

But Takadiwa doesn’t want this entanglement to make us feel hopeless. In one part of the gallery space he took writing desks from the colonial Rhodesian administration, burned them, filled the drawers with soil, planted them with rugare (a type of kale that’s a staple in Zimbabwean cuisine) and hung them under the gallery’s skylights. Stolen land is a primary feature of colonialism, and I could feel the sense of reclamation as I weaved my way along the corridor of hanging drawer-planters. In another part of the exhibition, a piece called “Sando Dzako” (“Big Up”), made of a dining table covered in nails, pokes at the coloniality of enforcing table etiquette in a country where we eat with our hands - not because we are uncivilised, but because food tastes better that way.

Takadiwa’s work so captured my heart that I visited the exhibition many times, taking friends and family with me each visit so I could revel in their first-time wonderment while I explored new meanings and absorbed some of the smaller pieces of art. What I noticed each time, though, was that the rugare planted in the drawers of the old colonial desks was gradually withering away until, by the end of the exhibition’s run, it was nothing but a series of flakey stalks sticking out of the soil.

On a practical level, it seemed museum staff had been given minimal guidance on tending to the plants. I was frustrated because I wanted the message to ring clear: this was a piece about the reclamation of stolen land. But over my many visits, I realised that, whether intentional or not, the withering rugare was telling another chapter of the same story. As we build new worlds from the remnants of colonialism, history’s lessons teach us that these hybrid worlds are fragile: they will not survive if we are not considerate custodians. We must till the soil and water the plants. We must care for our world the way it cared for us long before we began plundering it.

Words by Khameer Kidia