Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s Breakthrough Year: Incantations in London and They Have Always Been Here in Rotterdam

by artweb

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (2025) Containing Multitudes (image courtesy of Victoria Miro IG)

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, one of the most compelling voices of her generation, is entering a pivotal moment in her career with two major exhibitions this autumn: Incantations at Victoria Miro in London (26 September–1 November 2025) and They have always been here at Kunsthal Rotterdam (8 November 2025–12 April 2026). Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993, raised partly in South Africa, and now based in the United Kingdom, Hwami has long woven her journey across continents into her practice, speaking of a “conflicting love of land and inheritance,” a tension between belonging and estrangement that forms the backdrop of her work.

In Incantations, her third solo exhibition with Victoria Miro, she presents new paintings alongside photographic wall vinyls and her first bronze sculptures. These works combine fragments of family photographs, archival material, mythological symbols, and religious imagery, forming what the artist describes as “incantations or spells” that activate forces of hunger, chaos, seduction, and destruction. Among them are her acclaimed Atom Paintings, inspired by Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which embody interconnectedness and liberation, merging chaos and cosmos within the rationality of grid-like canvases. Figures appear fractured or spectral, echoing psychic fissures, while her process of layering, repetition, and digital manipulation destabilises the boundaries between body and psyche, fact and fiction.

Just weeks later, Rotterdam audiences will encounter They have always been here, Hwami’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Here, she expands her practice further, presenting layered paintings, digitally reworked photographs, and bronze sculptures that centre figures often rendered invisible in history, particularly queer people of colour within the African diaspora. Large-scale photographs taken during a journey to Zimbabwe are digitally expanded beyond their frames, creating ghostly, fading images that mimic memory’s elusive nature.

Hwami first came to international attention in 2019 as the youngest artist to exhibit in the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, returning in 2022 for The Milk of Dreams. Since then, her work has been shown at major institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Hayward Gallery in London, Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, and the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, and her works are now part of prestigious collections such as Tate, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Pinault Collection.

With Incantations and They have always been here, Hwami presents a body of work that is both deeply personal and urgently political, navigating heritage and memory while opening imaginative spaces for transformation. Together, these exhibitions affirm her position as a vital contemporary artist whose work resonates across geographies, identities, and generations