Five Bhobh – Painting at the End of an Era

The exhibition Five Bhobh – Painting at the End of an Era opened at Zietz MOCAA in September 2018, featuring twenty nine artists from Zimbabwe.

The following statement accompanies the work in the exhibition:

Shaw is a multi-disciplinary artist whose digital drawings, paintings, and sculptures explore the effects of the country’s political mile-stones, land-reformation, trauma, and violence.

We see this in works like Legacy: Red Fence (2017) and The Last Post and other Democratic Structures(2018), where the artist uses combinations of mud, wood, wire, aluminium, paper, oil, nails, and bolts to create abstract, symbolic references to power and violence. As the titles suggest, these are all materials commonly associated with fences — man-made structures that are designed to protect or designate territory. At the same time they are divisive markers that speak to continued histories of conflict, violence, and exclusion; of frontier wars and enforced boundaries.

• 

•