Solo Exhibition: Chiedza Pasipanodya
Commissioned by BAND Gallery
Fort York Historic Site, Toronto, Canada
July 18, 2024 - May 30, 2025
OPENING REVIEW
Written by Courtnay McFarlane (Artist | Curator | Poet)
“We gathered on a beautiful summer evening for the opening of multi-disciplinary artist Chiedza Pasipanodya’s public art installation DURA: A Mechanism for Recalling Sensibilities of Community Care (From Any and All Satellites Such As This) We were reminded that artist-poets can’t resist long titles for their work. Lol! As a gathering of mostly Black identified folk, we were reminded that we stood on Indigenous land, on ground contested, and remade. We were reminded that rivers covered-over still run beneath us. Reminded of a nearby shoreline artificially extended by landfill. Reminded of the precarity of the structures we build counter to nature that will be reclaimed by nature with floods and rivers overrunning this artifice. We were reminded of hidden geographies and buried histories. Reminded that we stood near sites of colonial battles and within sight of buildings still full of armaments, and a burial ground.
Chiedza began by acknowledging the ancestors of this land and the lands from which many of us have come. Their work recalls the power of the circles in which we have traditionally gathered and built. Recalls the structures of their ancestral homeland: communal granaries in which dried fruits were stored with a sleeping level above. Recalls the Shona people of Zimbabwe - their language (Dura meaning storehouse) and instruments (Mbira) fusing wood and metal as in this installation. Recalls a practice of community care and collective making: steel forming the structure connected to the industries in which mother and uncle have worked; 120 clay fruits made by hands of artist colleagues underneath a structure created by a group of women and non-binary metal-smiths and carpenters. Recalls the southern African land from which they have come, and the diaspora in which they/we live.”
ABOUT
This work is a public installation that manifests Chiedza Pasipanodya’s research-based practice, centered on southern African ways of being, ways of knowing, and aesthetics from a diasporic lens. Dura will be a structural interpretation of a traditional Zimbabwean communal granary. It considers the tensions between abundance/ scarcity while at Fort York Historical Site, a meeting place of military and migrant histories, geographical tributaries and myriad communities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & CONTRIBUTORS
Special thanks to Anne McKay, BAND Gallery - Karen Carter, Claudia Pensa Bowen, Josephine Denis, Christine Xia, Chanel Vinet, Courtnay McFarlane, Derek & Dorcas McGrath, Ferrier Metals, Hagstooth Studios, Maakost Studio, Masimba McGrath, Miles B, Misbah Ahmed, Moyo Mutamba, New Level Renovations, Rahel Elias, Samaita Dube, Sarah Edo, Shawn McGrath, Tadiwa McGrath, Tap Musewe and Yasmeen Nematt Alla for your contributions.
This public installation was commissioned by BAND Gallery in partnership with the City of Toronto and programming was supported by the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts (TFVA).
