RABBIT HOLE RUNS DEEP by Tawanda Takura
Bag Factory is pleased to present Rabbit hole runs deep, a solo exhibition by Tawanda Takura, comprising mixed-media, found object sculpture and painting. In his first solo presentation in South Africa, this year’s Cassirer Welz Award winner, explores the complex co-existence of dualities like freedom and dependence; novelty and recurrence; destiny and accountability; disillusionment and hope; the self and the collective; censorship and expression; memory and healing.
Central to Takura’s work is a critique on social hierarchy: he laments the unkept promise of freedom post-independence, which has instead given way to corruption and stagnation. Rabbit hole runs deep reveals the artist’s disenchanted thought spiral about the realities of contemporary Zimbabwe, reflecting on how socio-political dynamics continue to exert a profound influence on personal and collective identities, rendering both true liberty and full agency elusive:
“Everything is in the air. You can't be building castles in the air because there's no certainty… Anything can happen. I am questioning this notion: I want to understand, what it means to be free. Which unit of measure are we referencing? How can one celebrate freedom when one is still captive?
Should I call it the trick? It's not a trick. But it is some kind of brainwash ideology that we have imposed on ourselves. When you go through a tumultuous time like Apartheid, like Chimurenga in my country, before independence is established, before anything else, there has to be that rehabilitation and cleansing ritual for resetting and reconditioning the mind. Spiritually and physically. When you go to war, when you engage in such a terrible ordeal, you are forced to deny yourself and become something else in order to combat your opponents. You have to be a thief to catch a thief. And then after the battle is done, you are supposed to be integrated back into the community, you have to find yourself and become human again. It's shape-shifting. And somehow I feel it's a process that was skipped, so we suffer the residue of what happened because that trauma, that situation, it still lingers in our leaders. When you engage some war liberators from my community, you can sense the unresolved aura: aggression and self-disconnection. I feel as though it is a cry for
help.”
Takura’s practice imbues these ponderings on social hierarchy with spiritual inquiry. His recurring engagement with symbols of faith and ritual signals an ongoing search for meaning beyond the material world. For Takura, spirituality is not as an escape, but a parallel force that offers both solace and confrontation with uncomfortable truths. He says, “In order to understand the spiritual, to understand God, to understand the cosmos itself, you have to transcend religion in the first place.”
Through his choice of materials — found objects that have lived multiple lives, such as reclaimed wood, shoes and metals — he emphasises themes of recurrence and reclamation and highlights the cyclical nature of power and oppression that can seem impossible to escape. Just as these materials carry histories of their own, Takura’s works channel stories of resistance and resilience within systems that perpetuate inequality. In this new body of work, Takura explores collage painting and introduces new symbolic motifs, underscoring his evolving critique. The mute symbol appearing across various works, speaks to the silencing of dissent and suppression of voices, which are represented by the tongues of shoes, stitched together to form inanimate choirs. Hand-carved chess pieces reflect the artist’s view of individuals as trapped in a game of hierarchy, war and strategic manipulation. Where the battle is in the mind, the battle field that is a playground for knights, kings and queens while being a graveyard for pawns. Through its layered compositions and sharp visual metaphors, Rabbit hole runs deep citiques the failures of leadership and governance, presenting a stark but nuanced vision of a nation still grappling with its colonial legacy.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tawanda Takura has exhibited with Village Unhu at Cape Town Art Fair (2017, 2018) and Joburg Art Fair (2018), and undertook a residency in Joburg with the South African Foundation for Contemporary Art (SAFFCA) in 2019. His work was included in a group show at the Guns & Rain Gallery in March 2019, the Cape Town Art Fair (2020), and a two-man show with Thina Dube (2020).
He has since participated in the group exhibitions Unnatural Objects and Meeting Places, a collaborative exhibition with Bag Factory (2021). In 2021 he participated in a residency with Guns & Rain and a residency at the Nirox Sculpture Park, one after the other. He also had work showing during the Nirox Winter Exhibition, in 2022.
Trained as a shoemaker, Takura takes apart and expertly re-assembles old shoes that carry their owners' traces and biographies. Sometimes combined with other found objects and texts, these new figurations carry the subtle but persistent smell of rubber and leather. Hollow, hybrid, tortured and distorted, sometimes carnivalesque, Takura’s work comments on socio-political injustice, and often takes clear aim at what he sees as the extractive and hypocritical practices of charismatic churches.
The artist describes how, “at times, in earlier years, I was considered a madman, going around collecting old shoes... people would see a heap of shoes in my house”.
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