The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is currently hosting a groundbreaking exhibition by Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera, marking her first solo museum show in the United States. The exhibition, titled "Hidden Battles/Hondo Dzakavanzika," represents a landmark moment of recognition for one of southern Africa's leading contemporary artists. Located at the Boston waterfront, the architecturally striking museum sits in an affluent neighborhood, where the presence of outsiders is immediately noticed, highlighting subtle tensions of race and class in such wealthy spaces.
Zvavahera's artistic approach stands out in the contemporary art world because she focuses on dreams and visions rather than grappling with historical archives like most artists. Her work operates as a parallel form of knowledge, uncovering layers of meaning at the subconscious level where personal memory, cultural narratives, and imagination intersect. From an archival perspective, the exhibition is particularly compelling because it frames these dreamscapes with materiality through paint, paper, canvas, and brushstrokes, making each piece a document of emotional and cultural knowledge.
The artist engages deeply with traditional spirituality and African Pentecostal beliefs from her upbringing, illuminating spirits and revelations in her work. However, she transforms these visions with emancipatory gestures, drawing in bodily features and concealing them as they morph into animal-like figures or plants. When examined closely, her canvases appear as if they were cut and then carefully sutured back together, with each brushstroke representing a restoration of dignity through delicate craftsmanship.
Born in Harare in 1985, Zvavahera channels childhood experiences, ancestral presence, and mystical narratives into paintings that blur the line between figurative and abstract art. Growing up in Harare's art scene, she drew inspiration from both modernist and indigenous art traditions. She found mentorship and support from Gallery Delta and received formal training from the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Her work has earned numerous awards and international acclaim for its emotive force and poetic intensity.
The Boston gallery positions itself as a platform for amplifying singular global voices in art, presenting Zvavahera's work not as illustrative or ethnographic, but as intellectually and aesthetically complex. Her refusal to translate dreams into rational explanations is central to her artistic practice. Boston audiences encounter Zimbabwean perspectives within transnational conversations while preserving her particular lived experiences. As Zvavahera explains her approach: "People say their prayers with words, and I'm saying my prayers with a painting."
The artwork featured in the exhibition was created between 2021 and 2025, a period filled with mourning and melancholy during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Zvavahera functions as a prophet who uses canvas to transform dark dreams into vivid, colorful prayers. Her canvases are layered with pigment and texture, incorporating printmaking techniques alongside stenciling, delicate lace, batik wax, and even palm fronds from her garden.
The dream paintings on display are vast in scale, almost overwhelming in their presence, appearing as recurring visions or fragments from a psyche that is both troubled and fertile. The imagery conjures a world of vulnerability where specters in her dreams attempt to snatch her children, harm her body, make her grandmother sick, and unsettle her spirit. Rather than succumbing to these dark visions, she renders them into haunting paintings and drawings, binding them into linen, oil, and ink.
The titles of her works draw from Shona proverbs and folktales, including "Kurwira vana" (fighting for the children), "Tinosvetuka rusvingo" (jumping over the wall), and "Hondo yakatarisana naambuya" (the battle that grandmother is facing). These titles function not as simple explanatory notes but as portals that resist simplification, pulling viewers into the language of a cosmology not easily domesticated by English translation.
Zvavahera creates art of both scale and duration, with canvases that demand viewers linger and enter a meditative space where line and color pulse with life. In one caption, she writes: "I know there's going to be a battle in the future when I see a bull in my dreams." The bull, like the angelic and demonic figures in her work, serves not as allegory but as omen, a herald of struggle. This represents the artist's autobiography rendered in color.
Running through her series is a mystical or magical impulse that is especially vivid in her characters, as her paintings and drawings develop a kind of surrealist mystic experience. What haunts viewers is not only the possibility of harm but also the persistence of love, as they witness the artist's insistent refusal to let her children, her spirit, or her imagination be taken over. To dream becomes an act of fighting; to paint becomes an act of protection.
Zvavahera's work demonstrates how art can navigate both the intimate and ancestral, the personal and collective, offering a worldview that is too often marginalized in art world conversations. She brings to the forefront the depth of the African imagination, with her canvases staging encounters between forces of good and evil while transforming them into visions of resilience. Her exhibition serves as testament to the fact that African artists are not only present on the global art stage but are also helping shape the questions, forms, and languages of art itself.
