Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
b. 1993, Zimbabwe
Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami currently lives and works in London.
In 2016, the same year she graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she was awarded the Clyde & Co. Award and the Young Achiever of the Year Award at the Zimbabwean International Women’s Awards, as well as being shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. In 2019, Hwami presented work at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the Zimbabwe Pavilion, the youngest artist to participate in the Biennale. In 2022 she returned to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as part of The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Hwami’s first institutional solo exhibition, (15,952km) via Trans – Sahara Hwy N1, was held at Gasworks, London, in 2019. Recent institutional exhibitions include a solo presentation at Kunsthaus Pasquart, Switzerland, which was on view 10 April–12 June 2022.
Other group exhibitions include Reframed: The Woman at the Window at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK (2022); When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2022); Ubuntu, a lucid dream, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2021–2022); Mixing it Up: Painting in the UK, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); Citizens of Memory, The Perimeter, London, UK (2021); The Power of My Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France (2021); Force Times Distance: On Labor and its Sonic Ecologies, Sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, Netherlands (2021).
Hwami’s work is held in public collections including Fondation Blachère, Apt, France; Government Art Collection, London, UK; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; Jorge Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, USA; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa.