Tawanda Chabikwa

Cheneka

Mixed media

“I am curious about corpo-realities. About Indigenous technologies that reside within the human body. About our habits of perception that often prevent us from seeing each other, even as we are looking directly at each other. Over recent years, I have been drawn to re-visioning representations of Black bodies, bodies of color, queer bodies, and Indigenous bodies. I unearth and gesture toward the vastness of the interior worlds of each person. I contemplate the precarity of the vulnerable pride that remains porous to the world.”

— Tawanda Chabikwa

About the artist

Tawanda Chabikwa

American

I am Tawanda Chabikwa—a Zimbabwean-born, interdisciplinary, artist-scholar based in El Paso, Texas, exploring ideas surrounding practice-led research and indigenous research methodologies. I investigate contemporary black Africana aesthetics and the conceptual imperatives that undergird their work. The work centers the concept of “selfcraft” through aesthetic practices in Afrikan lifeworlds. I hold a B.A. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic, an M.F.A. in Dance from Southern Methodist University, and a doctorate in Africana Studies from the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Currently, performance, visual art, and research writing comprise my praxis.