An inconvenient truth.
Against a comforting lie.
By Nyadzombe Nyampenza
Most children raised by an African mother know out of painful consequence, the difference between a genuine and a rhetorical question. Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude growing up in Mbare could have learned it the hard way too. His latest project includes an artwork with an ominous rhetorical question for a title.
Life in our own hands? It’s the question that populations from colonial to post-colonial African states have grappled with. Nyaude brings the existential question to a provincial level. He turns the question into an intimate dialogue between him and the audience.
In the painting two pawns take center stage on a chess board. They guffaw in a self-congratulatory embrace. The strange absence of other players such as the Queen, Bishop, and Knight may have deluded the gleeful duo into a false sense of autonomy. With noses in the air, they are oblivious to their actual circumstances. Lurking below the surface a body precariously supports the circus over its shoulders.
Coming from an African mother, the rhetorical question usually carries a warning and a sharp reprimand. Nyaude’s painting turns the question into brutal introspection.
[Life in our own hands? was at First Floor Gallery Harare, in the exhibition Night & Day — featuring Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude with Wycliffe Mundopa.]
