Dana Whabira

Dana Whabira is the founder of Njelele Art Station, an urban laboratory which focuses on contemporary, experimental and public art practices that intervene into the city itself. Her research-based spatial practice incorporates found materials from across Zimbabwe, which are embedded with personal, economic and historical significance. The cultural, material or social-politicised sites are researched, archived, negated, reversed and affirmed, then transformed in attempt to question both colonial and personal constructs. She revisits the physical/cultural landscape to recontextualise meaning and narrative beyond binaries that have been pre-inscribed through controlling power structures. Paying homage to Dambudzo Marechera’s cult novel Black Sunlight, Whabira’s latest work weaves together installation and works on paper to investigate the nature of power, the experience/memory of violence, alienation and uncertainty. Working with Marechera’s text, this latest body of work explores novel ways of rethinking (material, transnational, physical, liminal, imaginary) borders embedded in language, identity, cartography and geography.