Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b. 1993, Gutu, Zimbabwe) is a contemporary artist whose work interrogates themes of identity, diaspora, and the politics of representation. Raised across Southern Africa and the UK, her practice emerges from a profound engagement with the complexities of cultural displacement and the layered experiences of the black body. Drawing on a diverse range of influences, including her personal history, Southern African music genres such as ZimHeavy and Afrobeats, and literary works by figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Carl Jung, Hwami’s art weaves a nuanced narrative of personal and collective histories, constantly shifting between past and present, local and global.
A key component of Hwami’s practice is her exploration of selfhood and the body. Her work often features bold, introspective self-portraits, images of her immediate and extended family, and powerful depictions of the body in various states of vulnerability, strength, and transformation. Through these representations, she addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and spirituality, pushing back against the erasure of black bodies from historical and cultural narratives. The centrality of the body in her practice—whether through intimate nudes or metaphorical renderings—offers a space for the reconsideration of representation, agency, and identity within both personal and collective frameworks.
Hwami’s process is an experimental fusion of photography, digital collage, and oil painting. These techniques allow her to layer time, space, and memory, creating compositions that both disrupt and reimagine the boundaries of identity and cultural belonging. Her works often combine intensely pigmented oil paint with fragments of personal photographs and digital images, resulting in vibrant, multifaceted pieces that collapse the distinctions between traditional painting and contemporary digital aesthetics. Techniques such as silkscreen, pastel, and charcoal further contribute to the textural complexity and depth of her compositions, rendering the materiality of her subjects both visceral and poignant.
At the heart of Hwami’s work is a conception of time and geography as fluid, non-linear constructs. In her words: “With the collapsing of geography and time and space, no longer am I confined in a singular society but simultaneously I am experiencing Zimbabwe and South Africa and the UK, in my mind. I’m in the UK, but I carry those places with me everywhere I go.” This sense of simultaneity informs much of her artistic language, where past and present, physical and virtual spaces coexist. The digital realm, in particular, plays a pivotal role in the formation of her visual vocabulary, as it was through early engagement with online platforms like Tumblr that Hwami first began to articulate her sense of self and navigate the complexities of cultural belonging.
Since earning her BFA from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2016, Hwami’s work has been widely acclaimed for its originality and intellectual rigor. In the same year, she was awarded the Clyde & Co. Award and named Young Achiever of the Year at the Zimbabwean International Women’s Awards. Her debut solo exhibition, If You Keep Going South, You’ll Meet Yourself (2017), marked a significant turning point in her career, followed by her landmark participation as the youngest artist to represent Zimbabwe at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Hwami’s work has since been exhibited in numerous prestigious international venues, including the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (2023), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2022), and the Hayward Gallery (2021). Her inclusion in global surveys such as When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022) and Dreaming of Home (2023) further solidifies her position within the vanguard of contemporary black artists.
In addition to her studio practice, Hwami completed an MFA at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art in 2021, where she continued to refine her conceptual and technical approach. Her work is held in major public collections, including the Tate, Zeitz MOCAA, the High Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Hwami’s artistic practice is defined by its ability to bridge disparate worlds—geographical, temporal, and cultural—while remaining deeply rooted in the investigation of black identity and the transformative power of art. By collapsing the boundaries of space and time, she invites us to consider new ways of seeing and understanding the self, while challenging the dominant narratives that shape our collective memory.