‘In Her Spiritual Art, Portia Zvavahera Paints the Tension between Her Dreamworld and the Everyday,’ by Emmanuel Iduma
2025
In a short video interview released as part of “Zvakazarurwa” (Revelations), Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, the painter describes a dream she had while pregnant. “I saw rats coming to attack me in my sleep,” she said. “It felt like I was under a tree in that dream. And there was so much darkness.” Shortly thereafter, she reconstructed the dream in a painting titled Pane rima rakakomba (I) (There’s Too Much Darkness), 2023. “The rats are coming,” she went on to say in the interview, describing the dream. “I don’t know what they wanted to do. But it was like a bad energy I felt during that time… something that wanted to take what I had in my womb… It was very terrifying.”
Read more at Art in America.
