Unstoppable

For us to fully understand and appreciate the work of artist Mukudzei Muzondo, we’re going to have to bring in the very antithesis to aesthetics: statistics. Bear with me here – what follows contains some percentages, but it’s important.

In 2002, Zimbabwe’s Population and Housing Census recorded that, at time of counting, 908,000 of its citizens had left the country – 84 per cent emigrating in search of employment, five per cent to further their education and training (ZIMSTAT, 2023). This figure of nearly a million emigrants is said by some to be a vast underestimation, with organisations such as Afrobarometer claiming that out of Zimbabwe’s population of 16 million, over a third are now living abroad.

There are many reasons for this exodus: tempting visa offers from short-staffed countries are compounding the problem. In the year ending June 2023, the UK granted 20,152 health and care worker visas to Zimbabweans, compared with just 4,270 in 2020. (Quite why foreign governments continue to pump money into countries while simultaneously luring their vital skilled workers away is a story for another day – and probably another publication.)

This issue of migration – specifically of people leaving Zimbabwe – is a hot topic both at home and abroad, and it’s of paramount importance to the art of Mukudzei Muzondo.

Mukudzei himself is not one of these statistics. Born in 1983 in Kwekwe in central Zimbabwe, he still lives in the country although he has recently swum against the migration tide by swapping urban downtown Harare for the relatively rural Marondera, a district about an hour and a half from the capital. His only foray into a life abroad was in 2009 when he was selected to be artist in residence at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town – certainly an achievement since at the time he was still a third-year student at Harare Polytechnic College.

Returning to Zimbabwe to complete his National Diploma in Fine Art (which had been preceded by training at both Peter Birch School of Art and Harare’s National Gallery) Mukudzei has since been using his experience of home and abroad to explore what he calls the “state of being” – what it is to exist as a human being within societal and political spaces.

“I use my own silhouette in most of my paintings,” he says. “It’s my way of representing the society that I’m in – a society that is changing as more and more Zimbabweans leave the country. I want to explore how these transitions affect both the person moving and those they leave behind.”

Where some artists represent movement with broad brush strokes and busy canvasses, Mukudzei uses the repetition of human silhouettes like an animation storyboard, evoking someone’s journey; sometimes he even fixes household castor wheels to the bottom of his canvasses to represent our constant motion.

While some of his pieces reflect an emigrant’s journey, others embody the solitude of leaving one’s home country: lone figures stand at the end of a corridor, the eye drawn to the furthest point by carefully calculated lines of perspective. “When you leave your country there is so much loneliness, so much uncertainty about where you are going and what’s going to happen,” he says. “And so much happens on the way to making the decision to leave, so many transitions.”

Mukudzei sometimes writes about the feelings that these transitions cause on the canvasses themselves: “The writing is a recent thing for me,” he says. “I want the artwork to evoke emotion and sometimes this comes out best in the form of words – so it’s as if the artwork is actually speaking.”

Writing on the canvas is one of the last steps in Mukudzei’s creative process. He uses old-school screen-printing techniques as the base artwork on each painting, but his palette is narrow: “I prefer contrast in place of vivid colour,” he says, “I like to focus more on the narrative. The joy of screen-printing is that you never know what’s going to come out. There’s no accuracy in the process and no two works are ever the same.” Eyelets and hand-stitching complement the drawing and print techniques: “I’m always trying to see how I can present something in a different form,” he says.
Mukudzei’s work certainly feels very different to other art coming out of Zimbabwe at the moment. While there may be feelings of discontent within the country’s creative community, Mukudzei’s message is far from blatant: it’s a whisper rather than a scream but its impact is no less powerful. “I’m trying to express reality with a strong voice but in a quiet, calm way. In this country you learn to be subtle about the way you communicate and that is an art in itself.”

Through his energetic yet understated artwork, Mukudzei’s message is coming across loud and clear, and we are listening.

Mukudzei Muzondo’s exhibition, “The Overview”, in association with Design//Life magazine, will run from 23 May to 20 June at Sabre Business World, 146 Enterprise Road, Harare.
Call: +263 787 513 555.
Email: sabre@sabrebusinessworld.com
IG: @mukudzei_muzondo

Words by Milly McPhie
Photographs by Simon de Swardt