Gallery exhibition explores architecture and memory
FIRST Floor Gallery in Harare hosted a powerfully crafted sensual art exhibition this past Saturday titled Ranezuro Rangu Ngariziye (My Yesterday Should Know) done by conceptual installation artist Anne Zanele Mutema whose visual artworks express ideas of space, memory and phenomenology.
Her previous immersive installation exhibition was titled “Systemic Necropolis” where she made use of minimal objects and materials such as recycled brooms, red string and clear plastic.
With this recent work, Zanele managed to expand the audiences’ aesthetic experiences of scientific visualisation, allowing them to also contribute their own vision and engage as cocreators of the work’s aesthetic importance and also in a way letting them re-imagine and re-circulate what they were actually experiencing.
In order to ensure the audience fully connected with the elements and the work on display, the gallery space known for its innovative programming provided a guide on how participants could manoeuvre within the installation consisting of two separate rooms, a black room and a white room.
e temporary black and white rooms, which will be in exhibition at the gallery for a whole month, struck a balance symbolic of the complementary forces of the ubiquitous yinyang symbol in its outstanding black and white shades.
Upon entering the gallery the first interaction point is the bright and airy white room draped entirely in snowy white fabric, seven white pods made from mesh net fabric hang inside, under each lace curtain is a compact mass of moist green grass wrapped in transparent plastic where a person stands barefoot and connects with the earth under the skin of their feet. Each pod allows a person to explore the seven different sensory experiences like scent, elevation, touch, sight, warmth, height constraint and absence.
e black room is completely dark and has seven cubicles with each cubicle providing identical astral projection experiences by merging the elements of water and the invisible energy of meditative music which is transported through headphones making one feel a connection not only with the universe but with times in distant memory.
e sensory purities and isolations of the pods and cubicles allows those within its space to internally engage in the process of stepping back in time and retrieve old memories while exploring an intentional out of body experience.
Visiting resident curator in architecture Liah Benarroch from Italy said the exhibition is “an immersive experience which one needs to approach with open mindedness and enter each part of it in order to experience something different as it connects to primal experiences and senses”.
“We need these spaces everywhere, spaces in which you can detach from everything and connect with yourself,” Benarroch said.
Benarroch, who accompanied Zanele in the developing and realising of the Installation, is currently in the country doing a residency in First Floor Gallery.
In the exhibition, the yesterday which Mutema is asking us to reach for is one we once believed, but also one that might precede our engagement with the physical world. It calls on us to connect with our innate humanity and purpose and a freedom we are born to exercise.
Mutema has spent a number of years trying to find a bridge between visual art, material practice and her interest in time based media.
rough experimentation, she has finally arrived at a unique installation approach. Creating immersive installation, she develops a dialogue between the audience and objects, focused on the idea of an event, defined as a phenomenon located at a single point in time. Searching to create, capture and recreate Events in the context of self, culture and history is a process, project and quest for Mutema. — Staff Writer.