Info & CV
Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean new media artist based in London. Using sculpture, audio-visual digital installation, image and video, they continually interrogate the multi-dimensionality of blackness, transcendence and ‘inbetweeness’.
Their current research interrogates the condition of ‘inbetweeness’ and ‘Intertopia’, a fictitious space which Makumbe has located to be in the throat of wormholes where those with ‘translocational belongings’ reside. ‘Intertopia’ stems from and draws from the cosmology, spiritual beliefs and ritualistic practices of the Shona people from Zimbabwe and its intersections with speculative interstellar travel, trans-ness & metamorphosis.
Makumbe’s starting point for this inquiry is attempting frame blackness in all its complexity and multidimensionality in a contemporary context. Wanderlust, movement between different spacetimes intersect with this through conceptualising blackness not as a what but as a where and when.
Through worldbuilding and the use of speculative science fiction narratives, they place significant efforts into exploring alternative modes of being and thinking that could negate ideologies inhibiting a ‘needed’ future.
They’re enticed by the materiality and malleability of digital matter and the infinite possibilities of its employability. They repeatedly bring elements from the digital worlds they’ve forged into physical spaces, through 3D printing, as a crucial practice akin to terraforming. Makumbe continually collapses elements from their worlds into present and lived spacetimes in order to blur the boundaries between the two.
CV
*Upcoming Show*
Player Piano, Opening May 5th 2023
The Art Station, Saxmundham
Group Show
2023
CIVA Festival, Vienna, Austria
Group Show
Fabric of Dreams: Towards a Technodiversity
Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL), Vienna, Austria
Group Show
2022
Arebyte Gallery, London, UK
Group Show
Visual Carlow, Carlow, Ireland
Group Show
We Exist & Koppel Projects, London, UK
Group Show
2021
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK
Group Show
Roodkapje Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Group Show
Symposion Lindabrunn, Austria
Group Show
Transfer Gallery in Partnership with Left Gallery
Group Show
Dateagle Art, London, UK
Group Show
2020
Bitforms Gallery, New York, USA
In Partnership with New Art City
Group Show
Arebyte Gallery, London, UK. August 2020.
National Galleries of Zimbabwe (Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare), 2020-2021.
Group Show
Vacation at the End of the World,
Offsite Projects
Group Show
Isthisit?
Group Show
2019
BBZ Alternative Graduate Show 2019
Copeland Gallery, London, UK
Group Show
Arebyte On Screen,
Arebyte Gallery
Specter, Wrong Biennale
Group Show
Wrong Biennale,
In Partnership with Arebyte Gallery
Group Show
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Talks, Panel Discussions & Workshops:
2022
Where Do We Go From Here?! Part 4 - Workshop
The Feminist Library & Kinesis Collective
Shocked Quartz Festival
Host & Workshop Facilitator
Presentation & Panel Discussion
Invited Guest
Where Do We Go From Here?! Part 3
Montez Press
Host
2021
Where Do We Go From Here?! Part 2
Bloc Projects
Co-host
Recipes for a Technological Undoing
Sandberg Institute
Workshop Host
Art/ Work Association & Auto Italia
Host
Networked Futures: Worldbuilding and Video Games,
Isthisit?
Panelist
2020
Invited Artist
Tactics: Power and Play, 2020
Arebyte Gallery
Moderator & Speaker
2019
London Film Festival Experimenta Debate 2019,
ICA
In partnership with BFI & ICA
Guest Speaker
The Conch, October
South London Gallery,
Guest Speaker
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Awards and Grants
Black Artist’s Grant, 2020
Daniel Arsham & Samuel D Ross
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Publication & Contributions
LUX, Editted by Cairo Clarke
Contributor
Networked Futures: Online Exhibitions and Digital Hierarchies
Isthisit? Edited by Bob Bicknell Knight
Contributor & Interview
Chimeras: Inventory of synthetic cognition
Edited by Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt
Published by Onassis Foundation
Contributor
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Selected Press
6 artists exploring the joy & pain of the trans experience
Feature, iD Vice
Review, Burlington Contemporary
Review, Art Newspaper
Feature, Wallpaper Magazine
The BBZ art show looks at what it means to take up space and to survive
Review, Dazed
BBZ BLK BK: Alternative Graduate Show 2019
Review, Skin Deep Mag
Pre-intertopia
Pre-intertopia is Makumbe’s initial step in their endeavour to encapsulate the experience and/or condition of being 'in-transit' through exploring the condition of ‘inbetweeness’ and ‘Intertopia; a speculative 4-dimensional space which Makumbe has located to be in the throat of wormholes where those that are ‘in-transit’ reside. ‘Intertopia’ stems from and draws from the cosmology, spiritual beliefs and ritualistic practices of the Shona people of Zimbabwe and its intersections with speculative interstellar travel, trans-ness & diasporic yearning.
Guidance and intercession is requested from ancestral spirits by an extended family through Bira ceremonies performed by the Shona people. Makumbe views these ceremonies as gates for communication, and possibly transportation to that which is beyond, that transgress the laws of physics that govern our experience of space and time. Makumbe hypothesises that the exotic matter required for traversable wormholes could be the spiritual faith, if thought of as a matter, which radiates in abundance from Bira ceremonies.
Her
3D printed PLA plastic, resin, aerosol paint
205 x 170 x 60 cm
Gourd
3D printed PLA plastic, epoxy clay, aerosol paint
85 x 21 x 20 cm
Untitled Drawings:
Untitled i
Oil stick on paper
21 x 29.7 cm
Untitled ii
Oil stick on paper
21 x 29.7 cm
Untitled iii
Oil stick on paper
21 x 29.7 cm
Exhibited at:
Player Piano, 2023
The Art Station, Saxmundham, UK
Speech Sounds, 2022
Visual Carlow, Carlow, Ireland
Living Doesn't Mean You're Alive
Living Doesn't Mean You're Alive, 2021
Video, 17:15
Available to view here.
Made in collaboration with:
HYE - Sound Producer
TAAHLIAH - Sound Producer
Alpha Rats - Programmer
Commissioned by Dateagle Art & Hervisions for Control the Virus Vol. 3. Kindly supported by Arts Council England.
Living Doesn’t Mean You’re Alive (LDMYA) interrogates the emotional aspects of a human’s emancipation from their body and their ascension into an informorph; a virtual body of information that possesses self-awareness and sentience. Within this process of translation, so much of what is gained is discussed but then what is also lost? And is what is lost of importance?
It is the nuances of the loss of one’s physicality that Kumbirai Makumbe is drawn to, and its parallels to what’s lost in our endeavours for progress especially when it comes to transformation. It's an exploration of the emotional particularities of being within the process of change itself. It’s a moment of questioning what truly fuelled their yearning to emancipate themselves from the confines of their biological human body. Was it the body itself? or was it the experience of inhabiting their body in the context it existed within?
In LDMYA you're embraced and taken on a journey through environments born out of the infomorph’s catharsis. The reminiscing, occasionally bordering upon yearning, becomes somewhat tangible and gains a materiality of its own. This matter then takes shape as figments of the informorphs psyche becoming sculptural and playfully flirtatious with comprehensibility.
LDMYA explores the liminal space between the digital and physical but also engages with the process of translation of matter between these two spaces. The Figments are physical and material embodiments of these translations.
Exhibited at
Fabric of Dreams: Towards a Technodiversity, 2023
Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL), Vienna, Austria
Futures Past, 2022
Arebyte Gallery, London, UK
Channel B, 2021
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK
Control The Virus Vol. 3, 2021
Dateagle Art, London, UK
From Then to Here, 2021
Roodkapje Rotterdam, The Netherlands
The Figments
Coming soon.
It Was A Mix Of Things
It Was A Mix Of Things (2020)
Commissioned by Arebyte Gallery for POWERPLAY, 2020.
It Was A Mix of Things follows the journey of a human undergoing the process of ‘Ascension'. resulting in their transformation into an infomorph, a biological entity or consciousness existing online. This is all in an attempt to formulate effective alternative transcendental politics. One that doesn’t involve the ‘malpractices’ and disheartening utilizations of technology currently evident in our socio-political landscape.
A multimedia installation comprised of the following works:
- ‘The Gate’, A ceramic 3D printing with a silver glaze
- A Nylon 3D printed Support structure
- A Beskpoke Marbled Velvet Rug
- A PVC print
- ‘It Was A Mix Of Things’ sound-piece produced by
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Evo's Turn
Evo's Turn, 2019
Video Work
4:25
Available to view here
‘Evo’s Turn’ explores Makumbe’s questioning of our conceptualisation of blackness and its form. The work explores a seemingly uninhabited extra-terrestrial terrain accompanied by a monologue performed by Makumbe’s Voice clone Evo. Within this, Evo questions its own inherent blackness, as an avatar created by Makumbe, in a way synonymous to an artificial intelligence questioning its own sentience, or better yet, its ‘human-ness’.
Exhibited at:
Intangible Care, 2023
CIVA Festival, Vienna, Austria
Uncanny Reality, 2021
Symposion Lindabrunn, Austria
Data Fatigue, 2020
Isthisit?, London, UK
Disembodied Behaviours, 2020
Bitforms Gallery, New York, USA
BBZ Alternative Graduate Show 2019
Copeland Gallery, London, UK
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Kumbiraimakumbe@gmail.com
Evo's Turn, 2019
Video Work
7:22
Makumbe attempts to capture and illustrate what they refer to as the perception of blackness as one-dimensional.
Available to view here.
Exhibited at:
BBZ Alternative Graduate Show 2019
Copeland Gallery, London, UK
