|
|
Zimbabwe: City of Kings, Bubbling With Catchy Artworks
 |
 Published by the government of Zimbabwe |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
The Herald (Harare)
26 March 2008
Posted to the web 26 March 2008
Celia Winter Irving
Harare
The roads of Bulawayo offer the wide spaces Zimbabweans crave for, the city itself offers gentility and good manners, and the buildings are fine examples of the history of architecture in Zimbabwe.
In the suburbs there are fronded palms and flower gardens creating an Africa in the tropics.
The way of life in Bulawayo is stately and measured, time is something to be savoured and enjoyed rather than run out of.
In Bulawayo a newspaper appears under the door of a hotel room at seven in the morning and is plentiful on street corners rather than searched for, scavenged for and never found.
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo (Douslin House) restored by architect John Knight is a majestic building which has gracefully acceded to modern art and the life of a National Gallery run along contemporary, verging on the international lines.
A wide staircase leads to a collection of paintings of the late Marshall Baron well-represented in the Permanent Collection.
These taut and tense canvases the outpourings of the artist, have large wedges of purple and green running along the face of the canvas like angry weals, with signature like squiggles crossing each wedge.
There are also the paintings of Rashid Jogee patches of sunset and grass colours with paint dripping down like rain after a sun shower.
On Saturday March 16 2008 the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Zimbabwe hosted an exhibition of painted Easter Eggs from the Czech Republic. These were presented in a festive setting devised by Marie Imbrova first secretary of the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Zimbabwe. This exhibition was the celebration of the natural life of a man whose words and simple actions and deeds tell many people today how they should live and how easy it is to do so.
The eggs carefully painted can be seen as fine examples of miniatures in art today. The giving of Easter Eggs in the Czech Republic reaches back to pre-Christian times when the eggs were seen as symbolic of regeneration birth and rebirth.
Placed in small boxes with glass tops, hung from small branches and trees the eggs in display appealed to the many children who: "burn through" the Gallery as part of their daily activities. The Gallery is a place of hustle and bustle, it swarms with students, brings to those who walk on the streets of Bulawayo a love of art and encounters with artists.
Students rush from room to room, lesson to lesson lecture to lecture.
Scholars work in a library where there is history of the Tate Gallery by Sir John Rothenstein for any art historian to die for.
The Coffee Shop is the hub of cultural life in Bulawayo, here people sip, eat talk or leave each other alone rather than give each other a cursory and customary greeting and move on.
Here people thrash out ideas, put forward concepts for projects -- here the work of the Bulawayo art community is done.
The Coffee shop opens out onto a courtyard with alcoves where early Tengenenge sculptures can be seen, stone filled with Chewa Myths, Yao folk lore and the withheld meaning of the enigmatic Makishi masks.
Unpolished the stones show their age and hold their own.
On various floors of the courtyard there are studios for artists which closely connect them to the life of the Gallery which they call their own. There are rooms where various organisations meet to propel the life of the arts in Bulawayo.
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo is viewed with civic pride in the city.
Exhibition openings offer a sense of occasion to this grand old lady of buildings, giving standing while consolidating its identity. Bulawayo is a city where history matters, where people have a sense of pride about their past.
The Gallery in Bulawayo gives the visual arts their standing in a city where music, drama, street theatre and festivals hold their own.
The acting regional Director Voti Thebe is an artist of repute, whose works are powerful across the board statements about his culture and the history of the Ndebele people.
The Gallery engages people with art at an early age, education programmes are there for the very young, and also for the young at heart.
|
John Knight has taken the appearance of the former Douslin House to heart in his construction of a National Gallery which is civic and community centred, a gallery which many people in Bulawayo call their home, drink their ritual cappucinos, read their books in peace and quiet, and relax as they would in their own sitting room or garden.
Exhibitions by embassies and the Alliance Francaise in Bulawayo give an international and sophisticated touch to what is presented.
Three days in a city where some shops may be empty but the e-mail works with speed, where one can walk peaceful and be left alone, where one can stay in late Victorian luxury at a modestly priced hotel, where the whole local art community seems to be at one's feet are hard to forget.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 The Herald. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
