Moving Stories come alive at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo

From the 14th of June until the 31st of August 2019 the beautiful historic halls of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo will be hosting an exhibition that aims to set in dialogue the many narratives and memories, fictional and documentary accounts that were inspired by the story of Skokiaan, a famous piece of music composed by August Musarurwa and performed in the 1940s by his band Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms.

It was later performed around the world by many musicians, including Louis Armstrong, who visited the country in 1960 and met Musarurwa.

The exhibition is entitled Moving Stories and Travelling Rhythms: Penny Siopis and the many journeys of Skokiaan.

Olga Speakes, art historian and lecturer based at the University of Cape Town and the exhibition curator, explains that the show will include a site responsive installation, paintings in ink and glue, and a video artwork Welcome Visitors! – all by a South African artist Penny Siopis.

A documentary film by Joyce Jenje Makwenda, a Zimbabwean historian, as well as references from the literary works by another famous Zimbabwean, Yvonne Vera, a former director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo, evoked through the works by the artist, form an important part of the multilayered narrative of this exhibition, Speakes adds.

Siopis’s video work Welcome Visitors! uses montage techniques to combine found footage – anonymous home movies of the sixties and some media sequences of Armstrong’s visit to Africa – with text and music, creating a narrative that speaks beyond the specific historically documented circumstances of the encounter between the two musicians. The installation pulls together many threads that emerge from the story and follows them, through the materiality of the objects and associative connections, all the way into the present moment.

The documentary film by Joyce Jenje Makwenda on the history of Zimbabwe Township Music provides a wider context for the narratives explored in the artworks through many personal interviews of those who keep history alive in their memory. The documentary (screened with permission from JJMCA) draws attention to the journeys of migrant workers that connected Bulawayo with Johannesburg and the wider history of jazz music that moved across borders and beyond restrictions imposed on people by colonial regimes on the continent.

The voices of the artist and the historian are echoed by the voices that animate the pages of Yvonne Vera’s famous novel The Stone Virgins. These voices reclaim their own memories of Satchmo and Skokiaan from histories that excluded them. Their words, which Siopis uses in her installation, and Vera’s intense, lyrical and rhythmic style, which Siopis invokes in the materiality of her paintings and their title, form another thread that weaves itself into the exhibition where journeys between memory, history and the present moment never cease to reveal new.