Biography Tendai Mupita was a printmaking and artists’ assistant to Senzo Shabangu and Ethiopian artist-in-residence Endale Desalegn. A final year art student at Zimbabwe’s Chinhoyi University at the time, Mupita also spent part of the year in classes and consultation with South African artists Kim Sacks and Toni-Ann Ballenden. Mupita has been involved in several printmaking workshops and seminars in Zimbabwe and has had two solo shows at Harare’s First Floor Gallery. He is the recipient of the 2017 Blessing Ngobeni Studio award, a 3-month residency at The Bag Factory. Working through a visual language that presents contemplations on meditative states; Mupita explores processes and conditions for meditation through drawing, painting, and mixed media. With a range of inspirations from religion, spirituality and the cultural organisation of African societies, he uses the form of the circle as a starting point to deliberate on the various means and ends to meditation. The circle is a form intrinsic to many African monarch governed societies in addition to being a symbolic means of translation and understanding for the more occult margins of existence. The monarch generally takes a centre seat and close advisors, elders, spouses, children, etc. are hierarchically seated in circular formations around the monarch by. Colour is...
Biography
Tendai Mupita was a printmaking and artists’ assistant to Senzo Shabangu and Ethiopian artist-in-residence Endale Desalegn. A final year art student at Zimbabwe’s Chinhoyi University at the time, Mupita also spent part of the year in classes and consultation with South African artists Kim Sacks and Toni-Ann Ballenden. Mupita has been involved in several printmaking workshops and seminars in Zimbabwe and has had two solo shows at Harare’s First Floor Gallery. He is the recipient of the 2017 Blessing Ngobeni Studio award, a 3-month residency at The Bag Factory.
Working through a visual language that presents contemplations on meditative states; Mupita explores processes and conditions for meditation through drawing, painting, and mixed media. With a range of inspirations from religion, spirituality and the cultural organisation of African societies, he uses the form of the circle as a starting point to deliberate on the various means and ends to meditation. The circle is a form intrinsic to many African monarch governed societies in addition to being a symbolic means of translation and understanding for the more occult margins of existence. The monarch generally takes a centre seat and close advisors, elders, spouses, children, etc. are hierarchically seated in circular formations around the monarch by. Colour is an important element in his work as Mupita uses it as an agent to disrupt the complacency of visual consumption. In Mupita’s own regimen, meditation sees the one lose consciousness of surroundings and external influences depending on the entity engaging the process. In losing consciousness of one particular reality, one’s subconscious is awakened or made aware of an “alternative” which is brought to conscious terms of understanding. One meditative state leads to another in patterns that called universal fractals. Muptia’s use of humanoid figures carrying animal features reveal the human body as an animal of spiritual consciousness otherwise ruled by primitive gestures and instincts. Consequentially, the bodies and forms alluded to are secretive of their complete physiology in material terms and are continually found and re/discovered as distorted enigma.
