Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantations

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.’

‘Hwami’s works suggest private worlds full of secrets and wounds.’

‘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.

‘Their poses carry two registers: outward, poised and expansive; inward, protective and contained. Together they embody both projection and survival, intimacy and interiority.’

 – Kudzanai-Violet Hwami