In the context of Kuzviramba Mamuri, art historian and curator Tamar Garb reflects on the work of Portia Zvavahera, which she has followed since the 2010s.
Having curated Zvavahera’s exhibitions at Fruitmarket and Kettle’s Yard, Garb draws on their shared exploration of a “poetics of revelation” to trace the multifaceted themes that run through the artist’s work, from early paintings exploring love, childbirth and motherhood to later pictorial experiments intertwining dreams, faith and the diverse artistic lineages that inform her practice.
In collaboration with Moderna Museet, Malmö.
Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art at University College London. Her research has focused on women’s art practices and questions of gender and sexuality in European art as well as on post-apartheid culture, contemporary art and the history of painting and photography in Africa.
Key publications include Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de Siècle France, (1996) and The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914. (2007). She has written recently on ASIKO and experimental art pedagogies in Africa as well as on artists/photographers including Marlene Dumas, Berni Searle, Mona Hatoum and Zanele Muholi.
Her curatorial projects include: Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (V&A, 2011); Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive (Walther Collection, 2015) William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: A Conversation in Letters and Lines (Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016) Beyond the Binary: Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt (Walther Collection, 2023) and Portia Zvavahera ‘Zvakazarurwa’ Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2024-2025. She is currently curating a show at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, which brings Dumeli Feni’s African Guernica (1967) to hang alongside Picasso’s Guernica.
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