Wallen Mapondera Asks: How Do You Even Sleep At Night?
by Richard Mudariki
At Mitterrand Gallery in Paris, Wallen Mapondera turns a deeply personal encounter with state power into a broader meditation on legality, responsibility and the human consequences of bureaucratic decisions. There is something deliberately uncomfortable about the question at the centre of Mapondera’s latest exhibition: How Do You Even Sleep At Night? It is not a question that seeks an easy answer. Instead, it lingers as an accusation, a challenge and perhaps even a demand for accountability. Mapondera presents his third solo exhibition with the gallery and uses a new body of paintings to examine what happens when an action can be considered legally permissible while simultaneously being experienced as deeply unjust.
For an artist whose practice has historically been associated with the transformation of humble and discarded materials, this exhibition represents an important shift. Mapondera has built a distinctive visual language from cardboard, paper, textiles, packaging and other everyday materials, cutting, folding, weaving and assembling them into works that speak to the social and economic conditions of contemporary Zimbabwe.
Now, painting becomes the vehicle.
But the change in medium does not represent a departure from the concerns that have defined his practice. Instead, painting gives Mapondera another way of entering the same territory: the complicated spaces where individual lives collide with systems of power.
The starting point for the exhibition is particularly personal. Mapondera draws on the experience of his sister, whose clothing business was affected when goods were seized by authorities. Her experience is situated within the broader reality of informal trade in Zimbabwe, where such commerce is not simply an economic activity but, for many families, a means of survival.
This distinction between what is legal and what is right has particular resonance in Zimbabwe, where informal economies have long existed in complicated relationships with formal systems of regulation. For people operating within these economies, the boundaries between entrepreneur, trader, commuter and survivalist are often fluid. What may appear from a distance as an issue of law enforcement or regulatory compliance can, at ground level, become a question of household income and survival.
What makes the exhibition particularly resonant is that the question Mapondera asks is not confined to the personal experience that prompted the work. It continues to unfold in Zimbabwe's streets. The escalating tension between Harare's informal traders and city authorities enforcing municipal by-laws. Under the operation code-named Chenesa, vendors operating in undesignated areas have faced intensified enforcement, with authorities insisting that informal trading must take place in designated spaces. Vendors, meanwhile, argue that simply providing a legal place to stand does not necessarily provide them with customers or an income.
This exhibition ultimately asks us to look beyond the language of legality and into the lives affected by it.
Because sometimes the most difficult question is not whether something was allowed to happen.
It is whether the person responsible can live with what happened afterwards.
Exhibition runs until 10 October 2026
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