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Yeukai Karengezeka-Chisepo Arts Correspondent
Bulawayo-based visual artist Shamilla Aasha is hosting her solo exhibition that opened last Friday at the First Floor Gallery running under theme “Ties That Bind”.

For Aasha being a Zimbabwean of mixed heritage is a mixed blessing and a rich opportunity for reflection. Traversing Indian and Shona cultures and traditions especially as a woman create parallel and occasionally conflicting realities and modalities of experiences.

According to her, pivotal to these is the idea of bride price paid by groom to the bride’s family but in Hindu culture it is the bride’s family that pays dowry. So which is the right to follow? These are some of the questions underpinning the exhibition’s theme. In an interview, gallery curator Valerie Kabov she said the exhibition carries lot of meaning.

“Ties That Bind is a body of work which speaks precisely to the joys and tensions of developing, sustaining and nurturing a blended identity. It is also a poignant point of difference between the conventions and assumptions about what Zimbabwean is today.

Aasha uses the narrative properties of her materials letting them speak to stories many people would recognise and connect with.

Starting with painted works, she merges the traditional sari and java with new fabrics, sewing patterns, pages of old books and writing thus letting diverse ways of bringing things together and assembling things from clothes become the building blocks of human character and biography. Aasha said the exhibition evokes thinking around societal values and is happy to showcase her work in the capital.

“This exhibition is both a challenge to tradition and a claim to a multifaceted heritage and destiny which places those with complex legacies one step ahead on the road to future shared by all. I am very happy to be exhibiting my work at this gallery for the first time,” she said.