By Dr Tony Monda

MASIMBA HWATI is a professional Zimbabwean artist and tertiary education lecturer in visual arts at the Harare Polytechnic.
He worked for two years on his show, Quantumlogic at Gallery Delta, which was officiated by the Ambassador of Switzerland, Luciano Lavizzari.
Using carpentry skills, joinery skills, metal forging and wood sculpture techniques of a Zimbabwean tradition, he has produced one of the most thought-provoking art exhibitions in the country.
This writer was fortunately privy to the artist’s musings for more than a year.
I witnessed his processes of working; painstakingly hand stitching leather; sawing, drilling and grinding wood; hammering and polishing mbira keys; splicing sisal and assembling an array of cultural trappings such as spears, goat skin grounds, bone, wood and other metal paraphernalia — elementary materials used by man from the beginning of time.
In his artworks, Hwati negates many prejudices against Shona craftsmanship in academic circles shedding a contemporary light on them.
During his working process he indicated his desire to discard the image of being a ‘found objects’ artist — declaring his desire for innovation and design as opposed to the re-appropriation of recycled materials.
As a result his faux-guitars and hybrid mbiras reveal his new inventive practicality.
Honing on ancient traditional African skills, he uses the language of our forefathers to bridge antiquity and modernity.
By assembling and binding Shona cultural material, Hwati has produced objects on the basis of the potential of the medium.
For example, modern rugby and American footballs are branded with an ethnic iconography.
They become leather ritual masks, re-appropriated for an African audience.
This process creates, invents and explores new trajectories of African vision and thought.
Thematically, his artworks explore the notion of new urban industrialisation and computerised imagery which he juxtaposes with the rustic purity of traditional Shona cultural materials.
Conceptually his work embodies a prevalent sense of national pride and solidarity. Hwati questions the cultural encroachment of the Western digital age and the overload of cyber information on contemporary African cultures.
A series of screen-printed images and embroidery on denim, emulating the computer culture of facebook, twitter, whatsapp and Skype, eviscerates technological communication and reveals how the Western digital world has thrust technocratic myopia on the youthful mind of the African — where technology has replaced the traditional role of the grandparents, aunts and sawhiras.
In another series of work entitled ‘Harare Thinking’ and ‘Urban Totems’, Hwati advocates a ‘reality check’ on the impact of cyber life on the African mind.
Here his linear ink drawings are concerned with the spontaneous expression of unconscious mental life.
These techniques were used by both the African San-bushman artists and modern surrealist artists.
Here, the mental and psycho-motor procedures of ‘free association’ and spontaneous techniques were used in art, as a means to eliminate conscious control and in so doing, express the workings of the unconscious mind.
Surrealism was a vital force in European art of the 1920s and 1930s.
Artists such as Ernst Masson, Andre Breton and others adapted the process of automatism in the creation of their artworks in the mid-1920s in Europe.
The use of words and images is dominant in Hwati’s artworks.
Here, urban Shona slang and English co-habit the artworks and seek to engage the man-on-the-street, aestheticians, academics, and young and old alike, in a quest to bridge the communication gap created by rural-to-urban migration.
The substance of his untethered intellect is propelled by the theory of quantum logic, which postulates a quantum variety of multiple viewpoints and multiple logical conclusions inherent in bi-associative cognition.
What he is in effect saying, is that by looking at the multiple meanings that can be derived from the context in which images and words are presented, one can arrive at an assortment of objective viewpoints — in this case the context is a multi-pronged, chronological projection of post-modern Zimbabwean culture.
Zimbabwean artistic traditions have always been viewed negatively by colonialist gallerists and colonial administrators, who often looked upon it as an anonymous craft of a group of people with no individual provenance.
In this case Hwati uses spears — mapfumo, hunting daggers — bakatwa, grass brooms – mitsvairo, and other cultural entrapments and endows them with a new lease of life, as subjective objects of contemplation.
The artist mixes and re-appropriates traditional cultural artefacts and instruments and re-represents them to a new age generation.
Hwati’s quantum logic is a literary and cultivated art exhibition which holds up a mirror to the young and restless urban Zimbabwean culture and society.
His works have a resonating cultural resonance and is one of the most provocative collections of art ever assembled in a local exhibit.
Here, the artist fires a salvo of formidable weaponry in the face of colonised contemporary Zimbabwean art.
It is interesting to note that although contemporary Zimbabwean art has come a long way since 1956, it was slowly beginning to morph into trite Western evocations of ‘Africanness’.
Hwati’s cerebral approach produces a sort of poetic, brutal beauty which endows contemporary Zimbabwean art with a unique African ethnicity.
He examines the condition of Zimbabwean youth today and the negative aspects of internet and social media, how it blinds the youth from the realities of life, and how it has substituted the role of the elders within the African Shona indigenous context.
He also scrutinises its capacity to erode the moral fibre of indigenous cultures. Similarly, his work takes a swipe at Western and foreign Eastern consumerism, advertising products and mass-media messages and divulges their negative impact on Zimbabwean morality.
Hwati was born in Harare in 1982 and holds a National Certificate in Applied Art and Design and a Diploma in Fine Art from the Harare Polytechnic.
He has held over 36 art exhibitions since the beginning of his career in 2003.
His latest show gives a new lease of life to indigenous African crafts and visual culture and establishes him as a towering new master of post-colonial mixed-media sculpture in Zimbabwe.
Art Consultant, Artist and Lecturer Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD. in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate of Business Administration) in Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, art critic, practising artist and Corporate Image Consultant.
For Comments E-mail: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com