By Staff Writer
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ) has appointed Fadzai Muchemwa curator for contemporary art.
In a statement from NGZ, the new position was created “to streamline its curatorial activities across its three branches, and continuously expanding network”. The curator will be assisted by two assistant curators who will be at Bulawayo and Mutare galleries.
Muchemwa was a researcher with the Arts of Africa and Global Souths programme in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, writer and curator operating between Grahamstown, South Africa and Harare. Her research explores notions of care in artistic practice, national archival records, social justice, histories of cities, topographies of knowledge production and sites of transition.
She formerly served as curator for Education and Public Programming at the NGZ from 2017 to 2020, and assistant curator from 2016-2017, where she co-curated Moulding a Nation: The History of the Ceramics Collection of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2018–2019), Dis(colour)ed Margins (2017), Culture in Communities (2016), and Jazzified: Expressions of Protest (2016).
In addition, she curated The Unseen: Creatures of Myth and Legend, an exhibition of artworks by Isaac Kalambata at the Lusaka National Museum in 2018. As visiting curator at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg in 2019, she produced the publication Curating Johannesburg: rest.less, under siege/in transition.
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She is also a 2017 fellow of the International Training Programme at the British Museum and a collaborator for Independent Curators International and the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition in Venice as well as a founding member of the Practice Theory Collective.
NGZ executive director Raphael Chikukwa said Muchemwa would “add value to our institution, both locally and globally. Her arrival launches a new chapter in Zimbabwean art sector”.
Established in 1957, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare is a museum dedicated to the presentation and conservation of Zimbabwe’s contemporary and modern art and visual heritage. It now has other two regional galleries in Bulawayo and Mutare and Harare as the head office.