The artist shares, ‘gadzi (shortened from gadziguru) is the oldest female being and a creative force tied to the legends of Shona people. She is connected to sacred places in our country: domboramwari, Great Zimbabwe, Matopos and domboshava. gadzi is a manifestation of everlasting and haunting resilience beyond colonial concepts. She is considered the mother of god, who gave birth to the magnificent Balancing Rocks. Both strong and precarious, the rocks carry the stories and energies of the ancestors from the past into the present and future.’
chipaumire’s gadzi is a ‘living and breathing organism’, constructed entirely by hand. ‘I moved away from trying to represent the rocks as they really exist in nature. Instead, we show the process of making.’ chipaumire builds the sculptures from wood, wire and cardboard, giving new meaning to everyday materials. The figure of gadzi is perched on the top of it all, reflecting.
The film transmits shifts of light and abstracted views of feminine presence in nature. The sounds of chimurenga (revolution) – also a popular music genre – are broadcast through ‘mountains of speaking wood’ and interact with the deep bass of dub sound systems. The speakers emulate ‘how god was heard through the rocks of Zimbabwe.’ To amplify sound, an mbira instrument is housed inside a deze (gourd), while the speakers are embedded in wooden boxes. These handmade, masterfully engineered resonators underscore the genius of African and African diasporic approaches to sound technologies.
You are invited to interact with the installation: peek through the rocks, sit on the speakers to feel the sound and move in response.
‘There’s no answer to what I’m doing. It’s a gesture I’m offering – a gesture to save the energy of the landscape, to move this energy, and to protect it.’ – nora chipaumire
New performances devised by chipaumire will take place in the East Tank, 26-28 June 2026.
Performance times: 26 June at 7 pm, and 27 and 28 June at 3 pm.
nora chipaumire
Born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – nora chipaumire makes work and creates ideas that straddle multiple imaginaries — African, black, woman. A life lived through aesthetics informed by refusal, defiance, negotiation, contradictions and more. These refusals take form of movement, objects, non objects, manifestos, sound and building a pedagogical practice (nhaka) that works the present now with the present past.
The Infinities Commission showcases the limitless potential for contemporary art. It provides a platform for artists who disrupt the boundaries between creative disciplines, inviting them to create an experimental new work for the Tanks, Tate Modern’s unique spaces dedicated to performance, installation and film. Each year an expert panel selects one international artist to receive the commission and three artists to receive research and development funding. In 2026, the three selected R&D artists were:
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme
Working across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices, this duo of artists engages in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Their approach has been one of sampling both existing and self-authored materials, recasting them into new ‘scripts’. Their practice investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live performances.
Sahej Rahal
Sahej Rahal builds original worlds through training multiple overlapping AI models to make works that argue for collective intelligence - and help an audience feel and train in what that might mean. He creates a world that demonstrates what alternative epistemologies for future technology might feel and look like.
CATPC, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise
Based in Lusanga, formerly Leverville, CATPC is both an art collective and a group of plantation workers. They work from what was once the capital of a palm oil empire owned by the Lever Brothers, today Unilever. After 100 years of extraction, CATPC re-appropriated an exhausted land, sold off by Unilever and, with the income from their art, developed the Post Plantation project: a community-owned, inclusive, multi-species food garden and a reforestation initiative, focused on regenerative relationships between art, economy and ecology.
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