Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda - Rizhi Solo Exhibition in California

by artweb

Zimbabwean artist Julio Rizhi will present a new solo exhibition, Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda (Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going), at Hill House in Pasadena, California, opening on 11 October 2026. Presented by Simchowitz, the exhibition brings together 22 works made between 2020 and 2024, tracing Rizhi’s sustained engagement with migration, memory, identity and the possibilities of transformation.

The title, drawn from Shona, establishes the exhibition’s central tension: looking simultaneously backwards and forwards. For Rizhi, the question of where one is going cannot easily be separated from the places, people and histories from which one has come.

Migration is particularly personal for the artist. His mother is from Malawi and connected to Chewa culture and the traditions of Gule Wamkulu, while his late father was Nyungwe and came from Mozambique. His parents migrated to Zimbabwe, where Rizhi was born.

His father’s recollections of that journey became an important family archive for the artist and eventually led him to investigate the wider histories of migration across Southern Africa.

What begins as a family story therefore becomes something much broader in Rizhi’s practice. Migration is not presented simply as the physical movement of people across borders. It is also the movement of knowledge, memory, customs, stories and cultural practices.

People move because they must, but also because they hope for something different, be it work, security, shelter, opportunity or a future for themselves and their families. In the process, they carry things that cannot necessarily be packed into a suitcase. Rizhi’s sculptures give physical form to this idea of movement and transformation. His practice draws on the structures and rhythms of pottery and weaving, beginning with research and drawings before developing into forms constructed from mesh and wire. Plastic is then layered, heated, coloured and manipulated by hand.

The choice of material is significant. Plastic, commonly associated with consumption, disposability and environmental waste, is transformed through Rizhi’s process into something tactile and sculptural. What is discarded becomes something that can be reshaped. This transformation echoes the broader concerns of the exhibition. Like people and cultures, materials can move from one condition to another without simply losing their histories.

Rizhi seems optimistic about the future, but the optimism is not simplistic. His materials retain evidence of their previous lives, while the mesh and wire structures often reveal a sense of tension and fragility. Hope, in this context, is not something given. It is something constructed. Among the works included in the exhibition are The Chakafukidza Part 6 and Mapping The Now Part 5. Their titles point towards recurring questions in Rizhi’s practice: What does it mean to find or create shelter? What constitutes a dream of a better life? And how do we understand ourselves while living in the constantly shifting present?

Together, the 22 works form a kind of material archive that connects personal history with wider Southern African experiences of migration and urban life.

Rizhi’s work is particularly relevant to contemporary conversations around African mobility. Southern Africa has long been shaped by movement across borders, whether through colonial-era labour migration, economic necessity, political displacement, family networks or the search for new opportunities.Yet migration is often discussed through statistics, borders and policy. Rizhi approaches it through memory and material.

His work asks what happens to the stories of migration once they become part of family history. What remains after a journey?

What gets inherited?

What changes?

And what might future generations make from what they receive?

Born in 1991, Rizhi lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. He studied at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s visual art studio before developing an experimental practice centred on found and discarded materials. With Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda, Rizhi takes a deeply personal history and opens it outward.

Where we come from is never entirely behind us.

It travels with us.