Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: When You Need Letters for Your Skin

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources, such as online and archival images, and personal photographs, which collapse past and present. Autobiographical in nature, her works address how in a digitised world of infinite images we construct a sense of self, or experience and try to understand one another in a complex social reality.

Hwami’s work often speaks to the fallibility of memory as images are produced and reproduced, impressing themselves upon us while becoming unmoored from their original sources. Through her process, the artist questions things that appear fixed, or possess apparent finality, opening up a space of imagination and discovery shaped in part by her years growing up in Zimbabwe and South Africa, her interest in metaphysics and spirituality, and expressions of contemporary Black and Queer identities. Here, the historical medium of painting is folded into a collage-like approach analogous with the layering of formats we associate with social media platforms today. ‘I think I am seeking freedom,’ Hwami has said. ‘Collage making, which is a process I use to create a picture, has given me absolute freedom as a strategy…’.

About the Artist

?Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami currently lives and works in the UK.

In 2016, the same year she graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she was awarded the Clyde & Co. Award and the Young Achiever of the Year Award at the Zimbabwean International Women’s Awards, as well as being shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. In 2019, Hwami presented work at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the Zimbabwe Pavilion, the youngest artist to participate in the Biennale. In 2022 she returned to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as part of The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Hwami's first institutional solo exhibition, (15,952km) via Trans – Sahara Hwy N1, was held at Gasworks, London, in 2019. Recent institutional exhibitions include a solo presentation at Kunsthaus Pasquart, Switzerland, which was on view until 12 June 2022.

Other group exhibitions include Corps et Âmes (Body and Soul), Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, France (2025); The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA (2024); Indigo Waves & Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora at Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2023); Reframed: The Woman at the Window at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK (2022); When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, curated by Koyo Kouoh, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2022), travelling to Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2024), Centre for Fine Arts, Bozar, Brussels (2025), and Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2025–26); Ubuntu, a lucid dream, curated by Mari-Ann Yemsi, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2021–2022); Mixing it Up: Painting in the UK, curated by Ralph Rugoff, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); Citizens of Memory, curated by Aindrea Emelife, The Perimeter, London, UK (2021); The Power of My Hands, curated by Suzanna Sousa and Odile Burluraux, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France (2021); Force Times Distance: On Labor and its Sonic Ecologies, Sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, Netherlands (2021).

Hwami’s work is held in public collections including Fondation Blachère, Apt, France; Government Art Collection, London, UK; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA; Jorge Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, UK; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, USA; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa.