The National Gallery of Zimbabwe will from May 30 present Portraits of Zimbabwe, an exhibition of over 80 photographic prints by the late Chicago Dzviti.
Portraits of Zimbabwe is made possible by the support of the Embassy of the United States of America.
The exhibition will be co-curated by Jennifer Kyker, an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music and as associate professor of Music in the College Music Department at the University of Rochester as well as Fadzai Muchemwa, curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Dzviti was born in Shamva in 1961, and from these rural settings, developed an interest for photography, which he later pursued at Harare Polytechnic in 1987.
This marked the beginning of a career that was one year short of a decade, but illustrious in detailing Zimbabwean life; with the caption of society, rites, rituals and roles laid out with a powerful objectivity which narrated urban, periurban and rural lives to the same degree.
Dzviti’s works substantiate the celebrated personality within the public realm, in the same gaze with the everyman.
This body of work focuses on a period starting from the early 1980s towards the middle of the 1990s; offering a window into what life was in the formative years of the postcolonial dispensation, a historiography of what everyday life was for older generations, which may serve as a time capsule for the youngest Zimbabweans.
Established in 1957, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare is a museum dedicated to the presentation and conservation of Zimbabwe’s contemporary and modern art and visual heritage.
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It now has other two regional galleries in Bulawayo and Victoria Falls and Harare as the head office.
