Curators of Zimbabwean Sculpture Worldwide
It’s hard to imagine the difficulty involved in transporting more than 300 stone sculptures from Zimbabwe on a world tour – some weighing so much it takes five men to lift them – but the team behind ZimSculpt has managed this tedious task for over a decade, and brings this beloved Zimbabwean art form to VanDusen Botanical Garden for its third and final year in Vancouver.
There is a widespread assumption today that art must necessarily be international… But against this trend one finds isolated pockets of resistance, which suggest that good art can (perhaps must) be a local affair – the product of a particular place and culture. And of the one of the most remarkable in the contemporary world is the last 30 years… placed beside the dismal stuff so beloved of the international art bureaucracy – as they were in the 1990 Biennale – these African carvings shine out in a desolate world.