Dreams & Revelations: Portia Zvavahera’s ‘Zvakazarurwa’ at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge

A review by Jelena Sofronijevic on the 11th of March 2025. This should take you 4 minutes to read.

Kettle's Yard
22.10 - 16.02.2025

‘Where do we go when we’re dreaming?’¹ is a question pursued by Portia Zvavahera through her painting practice. ‘Zvakazarurwa’, her new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in collaboration with the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in the UK, is named for her revelations, things she has been allowed to see about her life, in sleep² – a state and place that is expansive and often, frightening.

Spirituality is central to the artist’s practice, self-described as a kind of ‘praying with paint’. Zvavahera draws from iconography encountered through her Christian faith as well as European oil paintings alongside Shona culture in Zimbabwe.

Portia Zvavahera, Zvakazarurwa, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

In ‘Zvakazarurwa’, curator Tamar Garb follows the development of the artist’s practice, with her chronological curation. From the first room, of dense works from Zvavahera’s earlier engagement with women’s experiences, comes a starker second room — a plurality of scenes from one single dream about her difficult pregnancy. The latter is more revelatory of the artist’s process, often working on different paintings simultaneously. Importantly, her works are not necessarily grouped as ‘series’, but rather they are ’conversations’ between the artist’s representations and interpretations of a dream, ones which often end with what she has previously described as a ‘victory painting’. Zvavahera speaks of her practice as a means of catharsis, a process of working through experiences. This way of working is shared with painters such as American artist Sylvia Snowden³, whose paintings similarly resist categorisation as exclusively figurative or abstract.

Portia Zvavahera, The Energy Present, 2024

The subjects here, though, are darker, and more negative. Few human bodies feature in Zvavahera’s most recent works. The totemic figure of Fighting Energies bears more resemblance to the statue of the sixth painting in Gavin Jantjes’s ‘Korabra Series’ (1986)⁴, a more apocalyptic scene. The paintings are filled with more-than-beings, notably nightmarish rats, which shape-shift in works like Ndirikumabvisa , to the larger, more abstract forms in Pane rime rakakomba, while multiplying in The Energy Present. In Hide There, cow-like forms lurk between layers of lace⁵ and palm leaves, found in and around Zvavahera’s studio, painted and printed directly onto the surface. This speaks not only to the artist’s growing interest in the environment, incorporating natural media into her works, but also her continued interest in physical making and processes, particularly using the batik material. Zvavahera’s use of this material reflects a particular approach to printing – not only adding layers, but recessing surfaces, by melting and scratching away wax. This veiling and unveiling, present in her early works, is an assertion of opacity – one which challenges the limited interpretations of an engagement with textiles. Indeed, her most recent works feature more empty, negative space, left by the artist to ‘be filled by a higher power’ – culminating in a sense of simultaneous absence and presence.

Portia Zvavahera, Zvakazarurwa, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

Remarkably, Zvavahera reveals she dreams in monochrome, the colour coming only in waking life — the realisation of the dream in paint. She describes this process as one of ‘transferring energy’ from experiences of night to day; perhaps highlighting how the act of translation is inherent in her practice. In a conversation with Helen Molesworth, hosted by the gallery David Zwirner, Zvavahera noted that some recent dreams have concerned her visa and the stamps in her passport, the realities facing internationally-practicing artists based on the African continent. Zvavahera’s translations of some titles and not others – and crucially, not that of the exhibition itself – hold even more import. It reinforces the artist, as any individual with agency and an ability to retain opacity and ambiguity.

Whilst retaining a similar layout, the travelling exhibition, ‘Zvakazarurwa’, which moved from Cambridge (22.10.2024-16.02.2025) to Edinburgh (01.03.2025–25.05.2025) — beginning with a conversation between three of contributors of a new book accompanying the exhibition; Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela from Zeitz MOCAA —engages new publics, with different experiences and perspectives. Concurrently ‘Portia Zvavahera: IMBA YERUMBIDZO’ a panoramic commission for Fondation Louis Vuitton was on view in Paris, presenting another, more commercial context to engage with Zvavahera’s work.

Portia Zvavahera ‘Zvakazarurwa’. The first exhibition in Scotland of the work of Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera opened this March at Fruitmarket. Pic Neil Hanna

Dreams & Revelations:

Portia Zvavahera’s ‘Zvakazarurwa’ at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge

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