Identity Issues at the Core of Zimbabwean Contemporary Art

Zimbabwe Sat 30-10-2010

Identity Issues at the Core of Zimbabwean Contemporary Art
By Stephen Garan'anga | Africancolours.com

From the times that donkeys permanently shed their horns, Zimbabwean contemporary artists continually draw their strength and inspiration from the infinite layers of artistic culture imbued within the country over the centuries.

In the late 1950s the first art initiative created independently by a local Zimbabwean artist was born in Manicaland province of eastern Zimbabwe. Joran Mariga, who in 1958 was working as a labourer repairing roads near the Mozambique border, realized that the stones they were using to fill potholes could be put to a better use.

Mother Earth by Helen Lieros

He and his colleagues began producing perfect copies of historical stone containers, small statues and utility objects. Initially they gave them away as gifts to friends and passerby. Without doubt Mariga's group can be cited as the earliest, local African artistic initiative in eastern Southern Africa. They represented the beginning of a bigger artistic tradition, "the so called first generation sculptors" which would later put the country firmly on the art map of the world.

During the same period of the late fifties, the country had its first director of the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe (Frank McEwen) establishing a workshop school of art for the gallery's attendants. It attracted numerous artists of various ethnicities from all pockets of the country and their subjects ranged from their day to day chores, ancestral dreams, spiritual and traditional beliefs.

The well established Tengenenge sculpture community has artists of various origins of Southern African countries who have been living and working on stone with their families for more that forty years. It was established in 1966 by Tom Blomefield on his agricultural farm that he diversified to mining of rocks of various colours and texture suitable for the country's most renowned art medium.

A handful of his farm labourers were foreigners from various parts of Southern Africa who had flocked into the country seeking employment in its booming economy. They became renowned artists as they were carving away at their stones, whittling away at their wood, doing what they were used to and therefore doing it best. They portrayed ways of their lives, their spiritual being, confirming their identity.

Presently Zimbabwean stone sculpture is one of the world's most respected traditions of sculpture and also one of the most innovative and exciting developments in contemporary sculpture. It is a tradition of sculpture engaging feelings and emotions at a profound level and has an immediate relationship with the viewer of any culture or creed. It is perhaps for this reason that the sculpture has become the "representative" of Zimbabwe's culture and the firming of its identity in the world today.

Life Jacket by Misheck Masamvu

Great painters too have imaged that today even painting has moved from what we have known it. Other mediums as well have made their own landmarks that a wave of change has gone right across the board. Every medium is now equally superior as a trend, a loose embrace of a new way of looking at and making art with artists studiously avoiding the stereotypical work which has dominated previous directions in art.

From back yards rather than mountain-sides, from back lanes, rather than up dirt roads come these artists, hell bent and mind bent on this new approach to their work. But the common denominator of all these artistic journeys is the portrayal of the way of the people and who they really are.

If art is a product of one person's particular interaction with experience expressed in visual form, everything about an artwork -from the choice of medium to the smallest detail of content - is determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the artist's identity, who he or she "really is".

The viewer's experience of that same artwork is equally dependent on the viewer's own identity. By considering the artist's responses to a concept or experience and by comparing our own responses, both to the expressed interpretation in the artwork and to our previous encounter with that concept or experience, we can move towards a broader and deeper awareness and knowledge of ourselves, others, life and reality. It is in this meeting of the two identities - artist and viewer - that the artwork gathers its relevance and richness.

It is possible to conceive of identity as a liquid which is altered subtly or strongly by additions, orientations, pressures and defined by varying degrees of surface tension and viscosity. If one thinks of the range of alterations possible in and on a fluid this allows for endless permutation which mirrors the flux of identity. Alternatively perhaps identity is more stable with certain core elements which retain their dominance and to a greater extent regulate and negotiate potential alterations.

Healing Sky by Masimba Hwati

In Zimbabwe various other complications exist such as differing public and private identities or the gaps between personal sense of self and our identity as conceived by others. A sizable number of foreign parentage artists have strived in their work to illustrate to the fore their mixed up identities. One such well established artist is Zimbabwean born painter, Helen Lieros, the cofounder of Gallery Delta foundation for art and humanities.

The work of Helen Lieros is personal in a way that goes beyond trying to bring her experiences of the world to order for others to understand. It is her means of achieving a sense of inner resolution. At the heart of her painting is the question of 'self', of what she is composed, spiritually and culturally, in relation to her environment. This theme of exploration has sustained Lieros since her studies in Switzerland where, as a young woman aged 19 or 20, she first began to actively question the make-up of her identity.

Why this should be of such concern so early, and for so long, is due to circumstance and, I believe, to her very personality. Born in the country's Midlands province of Gweru of Greek parents whose arrival in Zimbabwe was accidental, Lieros's upbringing was not of a child adapting to the demands of its place and country of birth but that of a child far from its true home. The sense of dislocation was doubtless extended by the insistence that Greek alone be spoken in the family home, a language that was neither the colonial nor local tongue.

Her background is not an unusual tale, many children have been born and raised in foreign countries. The difficulty for Lieros was posed by the richness and depth of the history and culture of the country of her closest relatives. Justas many Italians feel condemned by the Renaissance, the French by the reign of Louis XN or the age of Impressionism, so Lieros had to do battle with an ancient and almighty civilisation which was thousands of miles away.

At the same time she has struggled with her identity as a Zimbabwean in a restless, and now, post-colonial society. Greek? African? Greek-African? Unlike the USA, for example, where one can be Irish-American, Afro-American, Latino-American, in Zimbabwe it is still too early for the acceptance of dual heritage and its nomenclature.

Lieros has always been unusually emotionally and visually sensitive, which may have added to her difficulties in evolving her own identity. In a previous interview with her, she recounted the visual sensations she would experience when playing the piano, of how she would see colours upon hearing notes.

This rare condition, synaesthesia, complicates one's experience of the world by making its colours, sounds and scents all the more vibrant with unexpected significances. To a synaesthete, nothing is quite what it would otherwise seem.

Lieros's search for individuality is not driven by a selfish and divisive 'I, me, my'. Instead, her creative force is a very positive and human desire to establish universal connections to prove that at heart we, and thus she, are not so very different after all. Recognizing that spirituality and myth are at the core of Greek and African culture she has focused on revealing and expressing the parallels she finds.

Her interest does not revolve around common topographical or figurative features. The connections are seldom tangible or physical in origin, nor are they or their meanings necessarily obvious to the viewer. Even if they are expressed through material form the equivalences and similarities she draws are often invisible being spiritual or sacred in nature.

To this end it is fair to say that Lieros is a painter in the Romantic tradition of Delacroix and the Baudelairean 'correspondance', and in the Symbolist approaches of Redon and Moreau. Expressive above all, her imagery is an intriguing blend of the figurative and the abstract. Lieros has evolved a poetic formal language which, in true Symbolist and Romantic style, is accessible to more than one sense.

Her colours for example, the patches of deep reds and blues, simultaneously invoke local sensations of heat and dust and the traditional palettes of the Byzantine muralist. The schema of the face that appears in so many of her paintings, the Ship of Fools and War Lords for example, changes its bearing from mask to icon aggressor to innocent. Its repetition through her work over the years leaves one with the distinct impression that this figure symbolizes one and all.

Posted By: Diana Achieng

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