Dare Revavhumbamiri
Solo exhibition of Terrence Musekiwa
Tabula Rasa Gallery, London
2 June – 18 July 2026
Solo exhibition of Terrence Musekiwa
Tabula Rasa Gallery, London
2 June – 18 July 2026
Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present Dare Revavhumbamiri, Zimbabwean artist Terrence Musekiwa’s first London solo, developed in collaboration with Catinca Tabacaru Gallery.Musekiwa comes from a long line of sculptors. He began carving stone at age five alongside his father Kennedy Musekiwa. This grew into him developing a visual language that breaks the divide between traditional and contemporary sculpting.
Each work begins with the familiar toil of shaping stone before being fused with found industrial, martial, and domestic objects; a tension that simultaneously challenges and pays homage to Zimbabwean heritage. His conceptual vernacular opens a dialogue about present-day Zimbabwe: its mechanics, politics, micro and macro trade systems, its hardships and the quality of magic that permeates the personal lives of its inhabitants.
Dare Revavhumbamiri is a meeting of five monumental new works. Built from the inside out; bones of cut and fused shopping carts, copper plumbing tubes, skin woven from internet cables, and aluminum fencing, hair and dress meticulously beaded from cowrie shells and deadstock jewelry. These larger-than-life sculptures are pulled from imagination into the physical realm through brute force and painstaking labour. All five are anchored by their carved stone heads drawn from the earth of Zimbabwe, the head is the seat of intention and the place where the ancestor resides. These stones root the work in the geology of southern Africa; each face made in collaboration, in a sense, with the spirit waiting to be revealed.Dare Revavhumbamiri resists easy translation. Its closest equivalent is something felt rather than defined, the instinctive, enveloping care of a mother bird protecting her young in her thick feathers: a love that cannot be captured in language but is deeply understood. This is how the ancestors are believed to care for the living, and these works are an ode to that. They represent Musekiwa's lineage of protection, his late father, grandmother, great-great-grandmother and beyond, a council gathered to witness, remember, and transmit.
Together the works form a shield each with a distinct charge: The Threshold Keeper: copper plates on the torso act as mirrors for the visitor's face: an invitation to self-audit at the gate. The Law of Kin: bullet and cowrie shells cascade like a genealogy you can touch. The Listener: perforated aluminium panels act as ears to the village and the cosmos. Internet fibres thread the skull, suggesting dreams as networks. The Healer: copper scars soldered visibly, not hidden: repaired as pedagogy.The Witness of Time: a spine of braided cables ascending into a haloed crown, clockwork fragments embedded at the sternum. Not time that passes, but time that gathers.
Rooted in Bantu cultural spheres, the works draw on ancestral cosmologies where energy is relational: land to lineage, children to elders, the living to living-dead. Taboos, those formative instructions absorbed in childhood, become architecture, frames that hold a community upright. Songs, warnings, praise-names, the texture of markets and homes are all braised into the surface of each piece: this unconscious inheritance that has shaped Musekiwa's hand as he builds. Yet the found and salvaged materials insist on the present, literal markers of the globalised world we move through, its histories immediate and still accumulating. The works hold both without resolving the tension between them. There are no longer absolutes or pure traditions; things change and mix. Perhaps that is how it has always been, and the illusion was that anything was ever “pure”. The result is an embodied archive, a mnemonic you can walk around; carrying the deep past and the recent world in the same breath.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Terrence Musekiwa (b.1990, Zimbabwe) comes from a long line of sculptors. He started carving stone at the age of five, at first helping his Shona sculptor father, Kennedy Musekiwa, and later moving away from traditional aesthetics. He breaks the divide between tradition and contemporary. While each work begins with the familiar toil of shaping the stone, works are then fused with a myriad of found and industrial objects.
His visual language wrestles with convention to simultaneously challenge and pay homage to Zimbabwean tradition. His conceptual vernacular introduces a dialogue about present-day Zimbabwe, its mechanics, politics, micro and macro trade systems, hardships and a quality of magic that permeates the personal lives of its inhabitants.
Musekiwa has exhibited internationally across Africa, Europe, and the Americas, including a solo presentation at the 2023 Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, participation in the 59th Venice Biennale's Zimbabwe Pavilion and 14th Dakar Biennale in 2022. He has held solo exhibitions at Catinca Tabacaru in New York and Bucharest, Eric Dupont Gallery in Paris, and hFACTOR in Lagos. His work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Ackland Art Museum, and the U.S. Department of State, among others.
Dare Revavhumbamiri is a meeting of five monumental new works. Built from the inside out; bones of cut and fused shopping carts, copper plumbing tubes, skin woven from internet cables, and aluminum fencing, hair and dress meticulously beaded from cowrie shells and deadstock jewelry. These larger-than-life sculptures are pulled from imagination into the physical realm through brute force and painstaking labour. All five are anchored by their carved stone heads drawn from the earth of Zimbabwe, the head is the seat of intention and the place where the ancestor resides. These stones root the work in the geology of southern Africa; each face made in collaboration, in a sense, with the spirit waiting to be revealed.Dare Revavhumbamiri resists easy translation. Its closest equivalent is something felt rather than defined, the instinctive, enveloping care of a mother bird protecting her young in her thick feathers: a love that cannot be captured in language but is deeply understood. This is how the ancestors are believed to care for the living, and these works are an ode to that. They represent Musekiwa's lineage of protection, his late father, grandmother, great-great-grandmother and beyond, a council gathered to witness, remember, and transmit.
Together the works form a shield each with a distinct charge: The Threshold Keeper: copper plates on the torso act as mirrors for the visitor's face: an invitation to self-audit at the gate. The Law of Kin: bullet and cowrie shells cascade like a genealogy you can touch. The Listener: perforated aluminium panels act as ears to the village and the cosmos. Internet fibres thread the skull, suggesting dreams as networks. The Healer: copper scars soldered visibly, not hidden: repaired as pedagogy.The Witness of Time: a spine of braided cables ascending into a haloed crown, clockwork fragments embedded at the sternum. Not time that passes, but time that gathers.
Rooted in Bantu cultural spheres, the works draw on ancestral cosmologies where energy is relational: land to lineage, children to elders, the living to living-dead. Taboos, those formative instructions absorbed in childhood, become architecture, frames that hold a community upright. Songs, warnings, praise-names, the texture of markets and homes are all braised into the surface of each piece: this unconscious inheritance that has shaped Musekiwa's hand as he builds. Yet the found and salvaged materials insist on the present, literal markers of the globalised world we move through, its histories immediate and still accumulating. The works hold both without resolving the tension between them. There are no longer absolutes or pure traditions; things change and mix. Perhaps that is how it has always been, and the illusion was that anything was ever “pure”. The result is an embodied archive, a mnemonic you can walk around; carrying the deep past and the recent world in the same breath.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Terrence Musekiwa (b.1990, Zimbabwe) comes from a long line of sculptors. He started carving stone at the age of five, at first helping his Shona sculptor father, Kennedy Musekiwa, and later moving away from traditional aesthetics. He breaks the divide between tradition and contemporary. While each work begins with the familiar toil of shaping the stone, works are then fused with a myriad of found and industrial objects.
His visual language wrestles with convention to simultaneously challenge and pay homage to Zimbabwean tradition. His conceptual vernacular introduces a dialogue about present-day Zimbabwe, its mechanics, politics, micro and macro trade systems, hardships and a quality of magic that permeates the personal lives of its inhabitants.
Musekiwa has exhibited internationally across Africa, Europe, and the Americas, including a solo presentation at the 2023 Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, participation in the 59th Venice Biennale's Zimbabwe Pavilion and 14th Dakar Biennale in 2022. He has held solo exhibitions at Catinca Tabacaru in New York and Bucharest, Eric Dupont Gallery in Paris, and hFACTOR in Lagos. His work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Ackland Art Museum, and the U.S. Department of State, among others.
Tabula Rasa Gallery (London)
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Tuesday - Saturday 12:00 - 18:00 | Sunday - Monday Closed
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