In “Ghost Making,Kudzanai-Violet Hwami plays with scale and perspective to collapse emotional states. In Murikishi (all works 2023), an image of a sleeping man appears superimposed on another; everyone is naked, lying with their legs apart. The fleshy tones are choppy and hesitant, with the texture of the paint mimicking some sort of digital malfunction. Hanging on the left, a smaller canvas, Stan 4, represents a man in profile. Both works are placed on a monochrome wallpapered photograph of the back of a man’s head. By superimposing the images, Hwami pierces moments of intimacy with the invasion of the camera’s eye.
In Murapithe spectral contours of one of the figures of Murikishi reappear, his face now fully emerged in crisp blue paint, covered in UV-printed foil. The canvas itself is affixed to a grainy floor-to-ceiling photograph of two men kissing in the street. The bottom left corner of the image bends from the wall to the floor of the gallery, as if a memory is unfolding in the present.
Together, Hwani’s works suggest private worlds full of secrets and wounds. What connection does the vulnerable and curled up silhouette of Man resting on red earth bring to that-face obscured in the shadow of a baseball cap-in the photograph hanging to his right? The triptych burning woman features eerie family photos printed on the backs of two painted men, one held by the other’s arm, separated by an eyeless, x-ray-like female body. Exhibited alongside a fractured portrait of another woman who drapes herself from the ceiling in two monumental backdrops, it conveys the lingering sense that time never truly heals, only rearranges itself.
