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Location

Chitungwiza / Cape Town

Discipline

Multidisciplinary practice — sculpture, textile, installation

Recycled plastic bottles, straws, thread; textile assemblage; mixed media

Pardon Mapondera

About the Artist

Mapondera's multi-disciplinary practice examines transformation through material re-use — working with discarded plastic bottles, straws, and thread to create complex textile compositions that engage layered narratives of history, culture, ecology, spirituality, and identity. Refusing to let us look away from the consequences of consumption, he proposes that regeneration is both an aesthetic and an ethical act.

Winner of the Outstanding Male Visual Artist award at the 2026 National Arts Merit Awards in Zimbabwe, Mapondera is included in Zimbabwe's Pavilion — Second Nature | Manyonga — at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). He previously participated in the Indibano residency in Dallas, extending his practice into dialogue with the African diaspora in North America.

Based In

Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe / Cape Town (working across both)

Medium

Recycled plastic bottles, straws, thread; textile assemblage; mixed media

Discipline

Multidisciplinary practice — sculpture, textile, installation

Themes

Material transformation and re-use, ecology and survival, history and memory, spirituality and identity, regeneration as ethical act

Notable Exhibitions

Second Nature | Manyonga* — Zimbabwe Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale (2026); *Crossing Lines* — Dallas, USA (Indibano Art Residency, 2025); represented by SMAC Gallery

Gallery