‘Portia Zvavahera Paints Her Dreams’ by Mariana Fernández
2026
Ahead of her mid-career survey at WEILS in Brussels, we consider how the Zimbabwean painter transforms fears and spiritual visions into images of unsettling beauty.
In Shona – the artist Portia Zvavahera’s native language – ‘Kuzviramba Mamuri’ translates as ‘falling in surrender to you’. Chosen as the title of Zvavahera’s mid-career survey at WIELS in Brussels, the phrase suggests a letting go of the limits of the rational mind. Dreams, one such manifestation of this release, can for Zvavahera be a channel for direct communication with God, akin to the biblical stories in which divine messages arrive in sleep. But they also belong to a matrilineal inheritance, and to the Shona belief that the living remain in contact with ancestral presences. In the studio, the Zimbabwean artist takes on the task of translating the emotional outlines of dreams into paintings, working through their contents in a process she describes as ‘visual prayer’.
Read more at Frieze.
