Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantations

26 Sep-1 Nov 2025

Overview

Victoria Miro is delighted to present Incantations, an exhibition of new paintings conceived in dialogue with a series of photographic wall vinyls by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. Also on view will be new bronze sculptures, the artist’s first venture into three-dimensional work.

‘I’ve tried to keep the idea of fragmentation at the forefront. It is all rooted in rapture, not distraction. A breakdown of inherited systems: religion, identity, gender and the body.’ – Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

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

Incantations, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, features paintings installed with large-scale photographic images presented as wall vinyls. Together, these might be considered as incantations or spells that activate individual elements and their corresponding energies – ‘forces of hunger, chaos, seduction and destruction,’ the artist explains. Imagery, drawn from family photographs and religious and mythological narratives, touches upon aspects of psyche, oscillating between individual and communal life, and territories of the unconscious, instinctual id and the learned behaviour of the self-critical superego. 

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