"Family comes in all shapes, sizes, and even colour."
Shalom Kufakwatenzi (b. 1995, Harare, Zimbabwe) works across textile and fibre art, photography, performance and teaching, dividing her practice between her studio and children's art education. Her materials come from the world of agricultural labour: hessian fabric, wool, fishing and tobacco twine, leather and upholstery canvas, sewn, knotted and layered into large textural compositions in which bright colours reminiscent of childhood coexist with references to dark places, dangerous and yet beautiful.
Her work begins from the personal, from the experience of feeling like a foreigner at home, and opens onto the broader histories of Zimbabwe: in "Mubatanidzwa (Adjoined)" (2023), sewn-on cartographical lines point to unfair land distribution, displacement and corruption, themes that have always been topical in her country, carried by materials that themselves belong to the land and its labour. Family, in all its changing shapes, sizes and colours, is another axis of her research: multi-coloured yarns weaving through her installations evoke the soul ties that bind people to one another, in a language that speaks of diversity and inclusivity while resisting, in her words, the sea of societal opinions.
In 2024 Kufakwatenzi was selected by Adriano Pedrosa for "Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere", the international exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale, presenting "Under the Sea" (2023) and "Mubatanidzwa (Adjoined)" (2023) at the Arsenale, within an edition that placed textile practices at the centre of the global conversation. A few months later she held her first solo exhibition, "The Cocoon: A Be-You-Till-Full Space", curated by Laura Ganda in Harare, an invitation to step into the artist's inner world, welcomed by the Zimbabwean press as the emergence of a new voice in the constellation of the country's women artists. Her work has been featured by Hyperallergic and exhibited at the Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. She lives and works in Harare.