“All creative practice serves three purpose: contemplation, transformation and healing. Learn to utilize creative practice as a research methodology, and to investigate deep questions through music, performance and visual art. Practice consistent and critical engagement with the historicity of your own bodies in relation to your contemporary reality. Learn to articulate your thoughts, observations, and goals in written, verbal and aesthetic form. Conscientiously document and explicate your meaning-making process. Allow your art to unfold in that highest order of mystical science: transmutation. Now watch as one thing becomes another”
– Tawanda
visual art
Tawanda’s current artwork contemplates embodiments of African philosophical percepts by re-visioning Black corpo-realities. His mixed media, palimpsestic approach to painting, sculpture and photography explores possibility of sustainable encounters between ancestralism and futurism within the Eternal Present of African philosophical time. Drawing on indigenous histories of esoteric symbology along with the commodification of the exoticized Black body, the work contemplates the tensions, frictions and excesses that haunt Africana agencies, interventions, and complicities. The perceptual inertia of the ongoing colonial gaze becomes the very tool used to transmute conceptions of Blackness; to articulate conceptions more resonant with Black Africana lived ontologies.