Kudzanai-Violet Hwami's Melded Flesh at Victoria Miro

Infused with energy and a vibrant colour palette, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami‘s intimate portraits and large-scale photographs now inhabit Victoria Miro’s London space on Wharf Road.

The exhibition, A Making of Ghosts (14 April–13 May 2023), is the Zimbabwean artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Hwami’s works urge us to consider ourselves in a world saturated with digital images.

Using family photographs and archival imagery, Hwami addresses her curiosity for experience and memory, and the different ways in which such faculties might become fractured by contemporary social realities.

In Murikishi (2023), Hwami depicts two Black figures melting into a single nude body. The sensuous melding of flesh is expressed in splashes of blue in a mostly red and brown palette.

The layering of figures against abstract backdrops is reminiscent of editing photos before sharing them on social media. It also suggests the dislocation that comes from moving, as Hwami did, from Zimbabwe to South Africa and then to the United Kingdom.

Hwami displays a gift for capturing raw emotional states and imbuing them with vulnerability. Her subjects, with their canvases overlaid on top of large-scale photographs as if they were huge collages, are captured in a moment of sleep (Resting man on red earth, 2023), a quiet laugh (Stan 2, 2023), or self-reflection (Chiringiro, 2023).

Main image: Exhibition view: Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, A Making of Ghosts, Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London (14 April–13 May 2023). Courtesy Victoria Miro, London.