Wadii?

Opening Hours

Dates: 15 - 25 February 2023

Hours: 11:00 am to 4:00p.m

WADII? (What’s happening) is a curated pop-up exhibition by two Zimbabwean visual artists - Franklyn Dzingai and Wilfred Timire - at the Cape Town Art Residency in Woodstock, Cape Town. This exhibition is presented as a collaboration between Gallery 1957, Africa First, Cape Town Art Residency and artHARARE. The event forms part of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2023 VIP program. 

When friends or acquaintances meet, the current urban street lingo expressive greeting in Harare is WADII? But it’s more than a greeting, more like a form of care; a ritual and holistic inquiry into one’s state of being and condition of existence. No wonder the works in this exhibition ruminate on portraiture and honorific portraits of personalities and popular culture in African cities. Timire appropriates woven polypropylene bags - ever-present especially in the informal economy - and transforms them into fine art by exquisitely stitching urban muses on them. The street forex bureau money changer makes an appearance, so does Sadio Mane, the African football star. Colourful flat patterns and textures that hint of African fabrics and various motifs of urban pop culture meet and mix in Dzingai’s collage portraits that combine printmaking and archival material. Photographs from family albums are rearchived and re-awakened in his portraits which exude a timeless appeal whilst giving flowers to the tradition of the photo studio. As Simone Weil would have it, ‘attention is one of the rarest and purest forms of generosity.’ In both Timire and Dzingai’s works, the everyday urbanites are centred as icons and muses. We see then anew. These are the icons of the city. 

WADII? puts in conversation Wilfred Timire and Franklyn Dzingai, the two recipients of the artHARARE Africa First Art prize from Zimbabwe who respectively created work on residencies in Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. Their respective residences were a catalyst for these works that centre relational aesthetics and convergencies between people, art and the city.