Sibathontisele / Let’s drip on them / Braon ar bhraon orthu

Sibathontisele / Let’s drip on them / Braon ar bhraon orthu seeks to engage the traumatic memory of the Gukurahundi, the four-year genocidal targeting of Ndebele people by Zimbabwean government forces. Maseko’s painted work and accompanying text is in Ndebele communicate a cultural and national history of minoritization and the affective politics of “dissidence.” Brought into the Irish context, Maseko’s work illuminates the potency of the native tongue against cultural and linguistic imperialism: the power of the political imaginary and precision of memory that one’s own language affords, as well as the transnational possibilities for solidarity.

Owen Maseko is a Zimbabwean visual and installation artist, currently living in Bulawayo and Inyathi. In 2011, he was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 10 most persecuted artists. Owen was arrested in 2010 less than a day after his exhibition opened at the National Gallery in Bulawayo – the exhibition Sibathontisele (Let’s Drip On Them). The exhibition was about the Genocide against the Ndebele also known as Gukurahundi, carried out by the notorious Fifth brigade between 1983 and 1987. Owen was charged with undermining the authority of President Robert Mugabe and causing offence to persons of a particular race or religion. The Mugabe regime later changed the charges to a more serious offence of falsifying information to incite public violence, carrying a possible twenty-year prison sentence. The case was taken to the Supreme Court, who decided to drop charges in 2015. However, the Supreme Court permanently banned the exhibition from being shown anywhere in Zimbabwe or from travelling out of the country. A remade version of the exhibition has since been shown in South Africa and Kenya, and now Ireland.

Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She is a Global Blackness Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution. She is also a writer and an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine.

Read the curator’s essay here, with more information on this exhibition.

There will be an Artist Talk and Walk Through on June 19 with Owen Maskeo. Free to attend – learn more here.