Kettle’s Yard presents Zvakazarurwa, Portia Zvavahera’s (b. 1985, Zimbabwe) first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Europe. Running from 22 October 2024 – 16 February 2025, the exhibition will comprise new and recent works, drawing from the cosmologies of Shona culture, Christian faith, personal experience and esoteric dream-worlds. The title of the exhibition is in Shona and translates to Revelations.

Mediated via an engagement with paint and print, and drawn from both European and African traditions of making, Zvavahera’s innovative surfaces combine lino and cardboard printing, wax resist and oil bar drawing, fluid brushwork and washes of printer’s ink. The result produces a unique, multi-layered effect in which patterns, shapes and forms register worlds both real and imagined.

Zvavahera’s work is always autobiographical. Her own surrogate self appears alongside figures representing family members, apparitions and hybrid animal creatures informed by her dreams, as well as the spiritual and metaphysical traditions with which she was surrounded as a child. Working from her studio in Harare, Zimbabwe, the artist tells stories that are drawn from sleeping and waking life, creating works that are not illustrative, but rather repositories for visions and feelings associated with life and death, pain and pleasure, love, loss and connection.

The act of painting, which is closely tied to Zvavahera’s Christian beliefs and desire to comprehend the metaphysical through her dreams, involves working through the potential prophecies and messages they encode. The connections between conscious and unconscious states, and between painting and praying, have been key from the start of her career. Zvakazarurwa will open with a selection of early works made between 2012-2016, which focus on the female body and its role in various rites of spiritual and secular passage: walking in wedding processions, kneeling in prayer and giving birth. As its title suggests, Labour Pains (2012) depicts a woman writhing in discomfort, her head arched back, her mouth agape and limbs askew. Similarly, Labour Ward (2012) shows a group of vibrantly painted bodies, tightly packed together to propose childbirth as a collective endeavour. These scenes will be shown alongside His Presence (2013) and Embraced and Protected in You (2016), one of Zvavahera’s larger works which suggests two female figures in the comforting company of a veiled entity.

The exhibition will continue with a pair of large paintings from 2022-2023 that explore a recurring dream in which rats, embodying harm and danger, need to be contained and withstood in order to protect herself and loved ones from harm. An example from this period, Pane rima rakakomba [There’s too much darkness] (2023), created while the artist was pregnant, will illustrate the ominous creatures from which she needed to protect her unborn child. The canvas will be shown alongside a new work from 2024 showing a menacing picture of demonic, shape-shifting beings clawing after a woman in white. Zvakazarurwa will then culminate in six large new works, all of which reference this nightmare, distilling it in layers of shape and form through patterns and motifs that have been pressed in lace, scraped in wax, washed in ink and delineated over huge colour-saturated expanses of canvas.

Despite the beasts and spectres that populate these images, the exhibition will also be filled with angelic cyphers that promise both respite and triumph. For Zvavahera, the act of art making can help identify both warning signs and positive divinations, as suggested in a new painting in which five huddled siblings appear to float towards the heavens together.

Zvakazarurwa is organised by Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, where it will travel from 1 March – 25 May 2025. It is curated by Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art at University College London. A new publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring an essay by Tamar Garb and a conversation between the curator and Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela.

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