Kombo Chapfika will represent Zimbabwe at the upcoming 60th International Venice Biennale in Italy from 20 April 2024 to 24 November 2024.
The other artists are Gillian Rosselli, Sekai Machache, Victor Nyakauru, Moffat Takadiwa and Troy Makaza.
This will be Zimbabwe’s seventh consecutive staging of the show, a successful streak for an African country at this world-renowned platform.
Kombo Chapfika is a multi-disciplinary artist, born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe. I studied in Atlanta,
GA. USA (BA. Economics 2006). A mostly self-taught artist, he believes art transcends any singular medium and that each discipline informs the other.
He has worked in animation, advertising, broadcast, web development, and fine art.
This range has been pivotal to developing my artistic practice, technical base, and creative direction.
His work explores the mutation of contemporary African culture as it adapts to modernity, and technological inter-connectedness. Curiosity, experimentation, and social commentary are central to my creative process.
Kombo Chapfika is interested in the interplay of technology and culture and how the tools we use reshape us. This theme has crystalized as he has become more aware of his own complex relationship with technology and all its psycho-social and physical effects.
It’s a topic which touches on the intimately personal, all the way to the global and inter-generational. His hybrid aesthetic echoes his personal journey, the ongoing cultural remixing brought on by globalization and mobility.
He creates art which expresses the immense potential and current dire straits of Zimbabwe, and Africa at large.
Chapfika is currently on a Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
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