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Stephen Garan’anga Visual Art
Like any debut solo art exhibition opening for an artist, the anxious momentous occasion brings that uncertain time, like the morning when the conscious minds are at their lowest ebb.
This was as clear as broad daylight when young creative and innovative emerging artist, Terence Musekiwa had his milestone solo show titled “Fearless Whispers” officially opened.

The mixed media exhibition was officiated by Germany Ambassador to Zimbabwe Ulrich Klockner at the recent launch of a new small art space called Koa Vha – Creative Hub by elegant beer brewers Koa Vha Craft Beer hidden at Newlands Shopping Centre.

The director of the young art space from Koa Vha Craft beer, Jimmy Saruchera explained that their creativity when beer crafting is an art in tandem with the creative ability that visual artists have when transforming their visual perception into material form. Saruchera said they offered the humble young voice the show because of his work that reveals his unique sublime confidence and skill and highly imaginative.

Musekiwa’s debut mixed media solo exhibition comprised of mostly small wall constructions dominated by the incorporation of various found objects and carved stone.

Musekiwa is an artist who takes anything for creativity’s sake and finds joy in the challenge presented by the holding together of the various materials into a single compact piece.

Nerves and wondering about the audiences’ reaction to artworks is one thing but the ability to allow what is inside to rise to the surface and what is felt to be revealed through human discarded objects is a reckoning force that tucks away everything and magnetically attracts audiences to be highly absorbed by the resultant work.

Terence’s work showed all the ingredients that reflect his privileged background, having been born in a family of well-known stone sculptors.

Unlike many stone-sculptors, of earlier generations, Musekiwa breaks the conceptual wall between the carving tradition and contemporary art.

His work begins with traditional stone carving methods but brings it into the here and now of Zimbabwe today, with pungent and satirical commentary on everything from religion to history, tradition and daily turmoil. Stone becomes fused with and comes alive in struggle and conversation with metals, glass, wood, cloth, plastic or resin designed as much to challenge tradition as it is to challenge aesthetic and ideological preconceptions. One of his art pieces titled “Chigondora” presented bottom remains of an aged Tonga basket that once was the aesthetic object in somebody’s wooden and mud kitchen of the torrid Northern Matebeleland region landscape, burdened by the colossal weight of a young Shona bull black springstone carved head.

Strangely the domesticated head wears a multi-coloured headband and an oversized cadmium yellow nose ring.

For Shona people “Chigondora” is an overgrown calf that could do without suckling ready to be prepared for land tilling, but one wonders why the dressed head’s freedom is under the jurisdiction of ancient basketry’s residue. On the other lengthy wall of the tiny gallery, a three part series of “Faith on Tap” brings to the fore the questioning of some entrusted basic human life support which ends up being the source of carnage. Symbolically here people put their faith on tap water in our daily urban dwelling; the tap becomes our very basic source to life support, but what happens when that very tap begins to release something else like contaminated water, sludge or blood?

What do we do? Who or where do we run to?

One of the three “Faith on Tap” pieces incorporates a stainless steel water tap discharging about half a metre of numerous stripped thin and flexible electric copper cables, supported by two short black pipes at right angle indicating where the discharge is being pressured from to where it is going.

The tap is joined at the right angle by a crimson thin plastic woven potato sack tightly tied to another spherical hard yellow plastic from a toilet flashing system water tank cut open irregularly to expose twin longish stone carved protruding human heads squashed by a sky blue baby flip-flop. These contents seem to have burst the hard plastic ball and one is left wondering why such unusual elements are attached to people’s life line.

What is it that is being fed into the sparkling water tap? Other high interest pieces of the show include “One’s Belief”, “Innocent”, “Murohwi Wengoma”, “Boomerang” to mention a few.

Musekiwa attended the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts School in Harare a couple of years ago and has since been a dynamic exhibiting artist at home and beyond our country’s geographical borders.