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‘Who am l’ by Takunda Billiat

At The Gallery
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ) in conjunction with the School of Visual Arts and Design will be having an exhibition, Green Shoots 2014, featuring the works of forty graduate student artists.

The exhibition’s opening will be on the 5th of February and will run up to the April 15 .Following this event, the NGZ has decided to capture the profile of the 2014 outstanding student, Takunda Billiat.

He was born in Harare in 1990 and grew up in Kwekwe. He started art since he was a child, but became serious in 2011, did his research and came across the National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design. He joined the School in 2013 in order to explore and broaden his talent. He believes art is another way of thinking and exchanging ideas with others. He does prints, painting and sculpting, but he prefers to work in painting because he believes colour brings out his message better and gives it meaning.

“In Life after Death” he holds a green Bible which he says means life. The Bible also to him looks like a coffin which has a pink ribbon surrounding representing love.

That is how he drew the piece “Life after Death”.

In “Who am l”, there is a person kneeling who really wants to pray and holds a rosary, but there are forces of darkness which he believes are distracting him. His work has religious connotations of spiritual deliverance and he communicates this through the use of a bible and a rosary. He believes himself as a machine which has to explore what he believes in.

During the two years was at the school, he has achieved awards like the Auxilia Chimusoro Award in 2013 and the Tavatose Award in 2014. He has done group exhibitions with the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Delta Gallery and other private galleries. He has had publications with the Herald and helped with the publication of the 2013 American Embassy Calendar.

Being an outstanding student for 2014 has given him motivation to keep pushing forward and he feels that he is on the right track.

He hopes to be an international artist and hopes to be famous like the gurus, for example Mofart Takadiwa, Graysham Nyaude and Wycliff Mundopa whom he said have motivated and helped him in his work.

He recently joined the Chinembiri Art Studio in Mbare where he is working on his artworks and doing exhibitions.

His message to the first year students and those who wish to be enrolled at the School of Visual Arts and Design is,“Art needs hard work, you do not have to give up on it, no-matter how much criticism you get from the outside world.”

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe is delighted to host the second edition of Green Shoots: The Graduate Exhibition after last year’s inaugural showcase which pre­sented the works of young and emerging artists enrolled at the National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design.

This year the exhibition focuses on our school’s graduates’ development as a vehicle to measure these students’ progress and to evaluate our own core function in nurturing artistic talent and contribution to the manpower development of the visual arts subsector in Zimbabwe.