Zvakazarurwa, or Revelations - Portia Zvavahera at Kettle’s Yard

Nadia Sorabji Stewart explores the dark inner world of Portia Zvavahera’s monographic exhibition Zvakazarurwa, meaning ‘Revelations’.

Exhibition ‘Zvkazarurwa’ at Kettle’s Yard. Photo: Nadia Sorbaji Stewart

Zvakazarurwa is a word in Shona, Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera’s mother tongue. It means ‘Revelations’... Biblical Revelations, or fears revealed to the artist in nightmares, or layers of paint, ink and oil bar under which white canvas is barely - rarely - revealed. It is in these cracks between layers that the artist opens her world to us. In this monographic exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Zvavahera beckons us under veils, leaves and feathers, to reveal a dark inner world.

Her life-sized oil paintings will hang on the walls of Kettle’s Yard until February 2025. This is her first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Europe, having exhibited at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and the Venice Biennale before being picked up by major global art gallery David Zwirner in 2021. She lands in Cambridge with force. 

The twenty-odd works are full of smashed-pomegranate pinks and desert-dust oranges. They master a variety of techniques, ranging from print and batik stenciling, to oil bar drawing and ink washing. It is this combination that creates the patterned bodies that stretch across her paintings. Lace print can evoke a white-wedding-dress fantasy or, just as easily, a hybrid animal apparition. But the apparitions allure rather than turn us away. Over the exhibition, they become as familiar as the warmth of her maternal figures.

Maternal figures from Zvavahera’s earlier work introduce Zvakazarurwa. Cloaked women seem to hover beneath billowing veils. How do we know they are women? Their forms are suggested only by Zvavahera’s intricate printing of lace onto the linen canvas. There is something maternal and all-encompassing in the gentle curve of their backs. Yet you could hardly say that the women are hidden behind veils. They seem to lift up translucent veils and beckon us in underneath, casting their world in the shadowy light that passes through them.

Ndirikumabvisa (2024) by Portia Zvavahera. Photo: Nadia Sorabji Stewart.

And yet, sometimes their feet poke out below, naked. ‘In my painting, I always leave the blank space because I feel it needs to be filled by a higher power,’ Zvavahera explains in a video interview accompanying the exhibition, which she named Zvakazarurwa (‘revelations’ in Shona) for this reason. Like a prayer to a high power, Zvavahera converses with her fears and nightmares on the canvas, until there is nothing left to say. This conversation with a nightmare is the inspiration for her most recent paintings displayed in the second half of the exhibition. Rats gnaw at the feet of sleeping women while onlookers huddle nearby. Sometimes, a phoenix-like figure explodes onto the scene. Darker, less inviting, these paintings tell a story of fear and hope in the presence of death, pain and love.

It is when explicitly painting women and love that Zvavahera is at her most potent. Labour Pains (2012) splays a skeletal pregnant woman on her back. Upside down (from our perspective), her head tilts back and a Brechtian scream soars out of her mouth. Meanwhile, her skin, painted wet, trickles down into her eyes. Cocooned by unidimensional violet brushstrokes for a background, this woman is not with us. In nearby paintings, women have collapsed and crumpled on the floor. A heap of fabric and bones, one almost looks like Agnus Dei’s The Lamb of God. She explodes beyond her human form.

I Want to Stay in Love (2017) by Portia Zvavahera. Photo: Nadia Sorabji Stewart.

Zvavahera’s layering of figures is the key to such explosions beyond human form. She lets us peer through the veil at the place where women’s bodies melt, like their translucent veils. I Want to Stay in Love (2017) layers three figures on top of each other, one cloaked, the other not, and a third only a half-formed thing. It is unclear who is who. It is unclear who wants to stay in love: the cloaked woman or the male figure? Perhaps it is an assault or perhaps it is Zvavahera's desire climbing unwillingly out from between them. “He” is clambering (behind her? on top of her?). “She” is a translucent cloud of fabric: faceless, nebulous, blue and swirling like the sea. She runs through our fingers like water.

Kettle’s Yard are hosting a free tour of Zvakazarurwa with curatorial assistant Megan Breckell later this term, and on the evening of 25 January, the gallery will host a discussion on the exhibition with Garb and a panel of guest speakers, for which student tickets are £6. The exhibition remains free and open until 16 February 2025.