Victoria Miro is delighted to present Incantations, an exhibition of new paintings conceived in dialogue with a series of photographic wall vinyls by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami.
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s paintings combine visual fragments from multiple sources, such as online and archival images, and personal photographs. Autobiographical in nature, her works address how in a digitised world of infinite images we construct a sense of self or comprehend one another in a complex social reality.
‘I’ve tried to keep the idea of fragmentation at the forefront. It is all rooted in rapture, not distraction. A breakdown of inherited systems: religion, identity, gender and the body.’
– Kudzanai-Violet HwamiIncantations, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, features paintings installed with large-scale photographic images presented as wall vinyls. Together, these might be considered as incantations or spells that activate individual elements and their corresponding energies – ‘forces of hunger, chaos, seduction and destruction,’ the artist explains. -
-
‘Hwami’s works suggest private worlds full of secrets and wounds.’
– Daniel Culpan, Artforum -
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Mothers, 2024 -
Imagery, drawn from family photographs and religious and mythological narratives, touches upon aspects of psyche, oscillating between individual and communal life, and territories of the unconscious, instinctual id and the learned behaviour of the self-critical superego.
-
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Portrait of Persephone, 2025
-
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Atom in Two Parts, 2025
-
-
‘I believe that each person we encounter embodies their own collapsing past and present, like a universe that contains many others. I think my paintings are more preoccupied with recording this, this network of interactions and possibilities which are reflective of how we each construct a sense of self…’
– Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
in conversation with Marco Galvan, Muse Magazine -
These works draw inspiration from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself and its line ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,’ which for Hwami speaks to an idea of liberation as well as interconnectedness.
The exhibition features a number of the artist’s acclaimed Atom paintings. These works draw inspiration from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself and its line ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,’ which for Hwami speaks to an idea of liberation as well as interconnectedness. The Atom paintings comprise individual canvases that come together to form one large work. A particularly wide variety of images, ideas and themes converge within them – ‘the whole chaos and cosmos in my head,’ Hwami says – in contrast to the formal rationale of the underlying grid-like structure of canvases.
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Atom Painting #7, 2025
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, gloriosa superba, 2025
-
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Mamoyo and Persephone's Final Cycle, 2025
-
-
About the artist
Portrait photography © Adama Jalloh -
Related
-
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantations featured in Artsy’s 10 Must-See Shows during Frieze London 2025
October 9, 2025'Ultimately, Hwami celebrates transformation and multiplicity, connecting with nuanced, exploratory expressions of contemporary queerness and Blackness.' -
Opening soon – Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: They have always been here at Kunsthal Rotterdam
November 4, 2025For her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands (8 November 2025–12 April 2026), Hwami has created a new body of work that includes layered paintings, digitally manipulated photographs, and her...
-
-
LIVE / ARCHIVE
An immersive journey through our programmatic strandsExperience our galleries from wherever you are in the world -
Explore current and upcoming exhibitions
-
Chantal Joffe: I Remember
14 November 2025 – 17 January 2026 London Gallery IThe exhibition takes its title from Joe Brainard’s iconic memoir and is inspired by the late American writer’s poetic prompts that evoke the atmosphere and time of memories. Joffe’s paintings... -
The Stories We Tell: Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands, Khalif Tahir Thompson
14 November 2025 – 17 January 2026 London Gallery II, Miro PresentsThe first significant introduction of three emerging artists, all born in the 1990s, to a London audience. -
Richard Ayodeji Ikhide: Incroci del Passato (Crossroads of the Past)
1 November – 13 December 2025 Miro Presents, VeniceAn exhibition of new tempera paintings Ikhide began during a residency with the gallery in Venice in spring 2025. Working in egg tempera on panel for the first time, he...
-
