Tawanda Takura: Zimbabwe
Scapegoat System
About:
Tawanda Takura’s (Zimbabwe) animalesque sculpture-masks, created from found objects, explore ‘the animal within’, emotions ranging from vulnerability to aggression, from tame to wild. Primarily made from discarded shoes, they also comment on the use and abuse of power, and a crisis of leadership both in his own country and globally. The sculptures take on additional layers of meaning through the fact that the shoes have been used and worn by multiple people. If and when they function as masks, the works take on yet further meaning: the masquerades we undertake in daily life, the things that we hide or expose about ourselves; the fact that “we can become strangers in our own skin”.
Hymn for the unjust
Gate Keeper
Invisible Duchess
“I work with old shoes because they have a deeper meaning; they absorb the previous owner’s soul and energy and have a certain poise of the owner in their structure. This somehow brings me closer to understanding the ordeals of the owners through their shoe,” he says.(Guns & Rain)