Portia Zvavahera surrenders to dreamscape and ceramic in Brussels

To fall in surrender, to relinquish the architecture of reason and step instead into the territory of intuition and dream, this is the invitation embedded in the Shona phrase ‘Kuzviramba Mamuri’, which becomes the threshold into Portia Zvavahera’s new exhibition at WIELS Brussels. Opening at the close of October and continuing through February 2027, this survey moves through the artist’s body of work with the logic of emotional progression rather than chronological tidiness, allowing each phase of her practice to illuminate the others.

Zvavahera’s early paintings arrive first, works saturated with the textures and tensions of womanhood. These canvases do not announce themselves with spectacle; instead they whisper, they suggest, they contain multitudes within their intimate dimensions. The artist renders her subjects with a vulnerability that feels neither confessional nor didactic, but rather as though she has simply allowed the viewer access to an interior landscape where feeling takes visible form.

From these foundations, her practice flowered into the dreamscapes for which she has become known: compositions where the boundaries between self and world dissolve. Leaves press against skin. Lace fragments dissolve into atmosphere. The paintings breathe with the logic of sleep and subconsciousness, where surrealism becomes not a stylistic choice but a way of witnessing how the body and spirit inhabit the same space as memory, longing and the natural world. There is nothing decorative in this synthesis; rather, each element has been considered and placed with the precision of someone who understands that the unconscious mind has its own rigorous grammar.

What distinguishes this exhibition is the inclusion of Zvavahera’s recent turn toward ceramics. This pivot represents not a departure but an evolution. If painting allowed her to explore the terrain of the interior life, clay offers something more tactile, more grounded in the physical world. The three dimensional forms speak in a different register entirely, one of presence, volume, the artist’s own hands shaped into material. Where her paintings create the illusion of falling into dream, her ceramics anchor us in the felt experience of form and surface.

Curated by Sofia Datii, the exhibition holds these distinct bodies of work in conversation, allowing each to deepen our understanding of the others. Zvavahera emerges not as an artist moving from one mode to another, but as someone deepening her investigation into how consciousness, femininity and the visible world speak to one another. The phrase ‘Kuzviramba Mamuri’ suggests a deliberate loosening of control, yet what becomes evident throughout the exhibition is that surrender, in her hands, is never passive. It is an active choice to listen, to perceive, to transform that perception into form.

Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).