Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Kresiah Mukwazhi and the curator Jeanette Pacher. It was recorded on February 17, 2023 in the context of the exhibition: 

Kresiah Mukwazhi
Kirawa
17.2. – 16.4.2023

In Kirawa, her first solo exhibition at an Austrian institution, Kresiah Mukwazhi presents a new body of work consisting of textile paintings and video works. Her mixed-media collages, sculptures, videos, and performances are informed by her personal experiences and observations of gender-based violence, exploitation and abuse in her native Zimbabwe. In vibrant textile works, female figures perform seemingly vulgar and obscene gestures, hinting at the artist’s inquiries into the arduous working and living conditions of female sex workers in Zimbabwe’s patriarchal society. Against this backdrop of precarization and marginalization, Mukwazhi uses her powerful work as a form of visual activism, scrupulously carving out forms of resistance and self-empowerment. Mutual support and encouragement, together with humour as a weapon and means of resistance, are recurring themes in her work. More

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Secession and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna / Site-Specific Art department. She was part of the editorial team of Ö1 Kunstradio and began working in the curatorial field at Kunsthalle Wien.

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Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Jeanette Pacher and Kresiah Mukwazhi
Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Produced by Christian Lübbert