Issue 9, Profiles

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

Lyrical Fictions

Words MATTHEW HOLMAN

Photography ADAMA JALLOH

In Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s Android Venus (2023), we encounter the titular Roman goddess of love and beauty, who often stands as shorthand for the idolized female form, depicted as she has never been before. In canonical works of European art history, from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485–1486) through to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), and Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647), the idéal féminin is raised up and becomes divine. In Hwami’s rendering, the reclined Venus is a robot with a human appearance, a reappraisal not of the perfected past but of the unsettled future. “By the late twentieth century,” Donna Haraway writes in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), an influential text for the artist, “our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” For Harraway and Hwami, the female body is no longer a purely organic being – the kind of exalted organic being as historically represented in the figure of Venus – but rather a combination of biological and technological elements who becomes, in Hwami’s vision of mediated images, especially fraught when seen in the context of the discordant image carousels of social media.

This duality is played out in Hwami’s picture. Her Venus is wincingly over-exposed, as in a Man Ray solarisation, in which halo-like outlines of reversed tonality partially emphasise the contours of the body, and especially her hair. As the artist moves between the analogue (such as the technique of solarisation, created during the development of the photograph) and the digital (the fragmentary glitches of broken-down colour, as in a smashed phone screen) Hwami asks us to think about different historical modes of perception, and of the gazed-upon female form, to challenge our own habits of looking and knowing. Hwami ensures we stare closer at her subject, not away. “I made this painting in celebration of female sexuality and its relation to the west, as well as how it encourages self-expression,” Hwami tells me, whilst also recognising a “sinister” quality because we “see Venus in pictures” but increasingly “can no longer relate.”

In her long narrative poem Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), Robin Coste Lewis chose two lines by Reginald Shepherd for her epigraph: “And never forget beauty, / however strange or difficult.” It is a reminder that what is beautiful and marvellous is not always straightforward or delivered as such. Coste Lewis’ title refers to a painting by English artist Thomas Stothard who, like Hwami, revises Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece, in which Venus emerges fully-grown on a giant oyster shell to the shore from the sea, to make a social statement. But if Stothard sought to provide a Renaissance visual framework to justify the British stewardship of the transatlantic slave trade, Coste Lewis and Hwami challenge how and why we find beauty in the “strange” and “difficult” in our own moment, speaking back against histories of power and subjugation, adoration and objectification.

The bold gestures and sumptuous colours of Hwami’s canvases offer a lyrical quality: we are called to the beauty of her compositions, but, as in the most compelling poems, they remain difficult to figure out because of their restlessly fractured sense of form and history. “Looking at my work, I’ve tried to keep the idea of fragmentation at the forefront,” Hwami says: “It is all rooted in rapture, not distraction; it’s a breakdown of inherited systems: religion, identity, gender and the body.” For Hwami, the form and the content of her pictures are always in restless dialogue, and it is left to us to interpret the meanings generated by the accidents of juxtaposing and collaged images, gleaned from historical and contemporary source material, whether online or in archival photographs of a deeply autobiographical nature. At the heart of her practice is a recognition that, in our image-saturated age, we are becoming more estranged from one another the more we intimately see one another on screens.

It is for these reasons that Hwami has turned to foundational narratives from religion and philosophy to help make sense of our moment. Many of Hwami’s paintings reimagine stories from the Bible, especially the foundational accounts of Genesis: God creates man and the world; woman sins; man and woman are expelled from paradise. Hwami grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa, predominantly Christian countries (the religion was consolidated in the region by Protestant missionaries, particularly from the Dutch East India Company and the London Missionary Society, between the colonial period of the 17th and 19th centuries). As a child, Hwami was surrounded by a plethora of churches and sects and, in her words, “few libraries.” Religion was an overwhelming presence.

It is unsurprising that Christian imagery finds its way into her pictures, but their transformation from likeness is extraordinary. In Adam Cracked Open (2023) we encounter a seated figure, a reference to the first man, but whose splayed legs reveal not a penis – nor, as was common from the Renaissance, a concealing fig leaf to hide their shame after their expulsion from Eden – but a vagina. “It’s a myth undone,” Hwami says: “We can no longer abide by the old story. It’s a rapture or a divine glitch … his story is cracked under pressure. It’s a story of a man no longer held by a script but still marked by it.” The definition of “glitch” refers to “a sudden surge of current,” and this feels like a useful way of approaching these pictures: a powerful electric shock destabilizes the coherence of the image and, in turn, forces us to think through the coherence of the subject. I cannot help but think about the word “glitch” as a representative way of looking at Hwami’s work. In the way fragmentary and discordant elements appear to cut through and rupture the coherence of the compositions, we are reminded of the ways in which visual subjects, as on a screen, can become beset by the temporary malfunction or fault of equipment. In Eden (2023), for instance, we find two figures, Adam and Eve, looking back at us through a canopy of dematerialised foliage and juts of discontinuous colour, as though a virus has disaggregated a digital image. If it is possible for a gesture and a facial expression to be contemporary, they embody it: their rightward slouch and soft smiles are reminiscent of friends posing for photographs at a party, subtly focusing their gaze for an iPhone to snap them.