The Sunday Mail
Desire Ncube
THE National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe will this month host an exhibition that will bring together artistes and religious experts in a bid to explore the relationship between artistes and religion.
Running under the theme, “Connection,” the exhibition follows the “Folklore Exhibition” which the Gallery hosted last year.
In an interview with The Sunday Mail Religion last week, one of the exhibition organisers, Ms Lilian Chaonwa said the “Connection” idea came into being after a realisation that art serve s as the visual counterpart to religious stories. Ms Chaona, who is also the gallery’s Collection Manager, said sacred paintings, pictures, sculptures, symbols, dances, hymns and tunes have been used in rituals, to inspire and strengthen faith through public and private devotion in places of worship or domestic settings.
“My idea at first was to deal with Arts and Christianity and I felt I was excluding other religions, so I decided to rename the exhibition to Arts and Religion.
“The exhibition is seeking to answer the question why artistes are so much interested in religious subject matter? “Is it because they are religious or is it that they are Christians, Muslims, Hindu, Buddhists or any other religion? Or it’s all about the way they were raised,” Ms Chaonwa said. She said currently they are looking at the history of art, from which most of the celebrated artistes did so much work on religion.
“The most celebrated artistes worked on a collecting force that of religious subjects which drew them to fame,” Ms Chaonwa said.
The “Connection” exhibition will be conducted using the items displayed in the National Gallery’s permanent collection. This permanent collection began as a gathering of specifically different items such as wood, clay and cloth. An employee at the gallery who refused to be named gave a historical background of art and religion saying these two are inseparable.
“They both are creations of the unique human brain, a brain that can use the power of imagination to conceive of a past and a future, a brain able to invent multiple fantasy realities to supplement factual reality when reality eludes understanding or explanations.
“Religion and art require physical and intellectual human skills for their creation and they give human life purpose and beauty beyond sheer survival,” he said.
He added that other animals can employ considerable craftsmanship in building their nests, in their musical calls, in their mating dances, but these have strictly survival value, even if humans can perceive artful beauty in them.
“Human art and religion go far beyond immediate survival purposes; they work towards the goal of species survival by strengthening the social bond between humans and by engendering positive emotions of joy, hope and empathy.
“They can lend the comfort of imagined certainty and order in an environment of uncertainties. This is because art is a reflection of our humanity, not necessarily a mirror image, but one reshaped by emotions. Individual imagination and cultural traditions act like a light ray which is bent by entering a new medium, like water,” he concluded.
