Moffat Takadiwa

Moffat Takadiwa (b. 1983, Hurungwe) lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. A prominent figure in the post-independence generation of Zimbabwean artists, Takadiwa transforms post-consumer waste — computer keyboard keys, toothbrushes, toothpaste tube caps, plastic bottle tops, and perfume containers — into densely layered, tapestry-like wall works and sculptures. Working from his Korekore heritage in northern Zimbabwe, he employs the weaving structures and visual grammar of Korekore textile traditions to organize these materials into large-scale compositions that operate simultaneously as abstraction and as political argument.

The materials Takadiwa uses are largely post-consumer waste from the West that ends up in landfills in Zimbabwe and across the African continent — the residue of global trade asymmetries made physical. By sorting, threading, and weaving these objects into compositions structured by Korekore formal logic, he reverses their trajectory: objects associated with Western consumption and disposal are reclaimed through an indigenous epistemological system and returned as aesthetic and critical works. The keyboard keys that feature prominently across his practice carry an additional layer: language itself, imported through colonial and digital infrastructures, transformed here into material for a visual vernacular rooted elsewhere. He has described this approach as “post-colonial African Dada.”

Takadiwa is also a founder of Mbare Art Space in Harare, established in a former colonial beer hall and recognized as the world’s first arts center dedicated to the repurposing of reclaimed materials. The space plays a central role in mentoring the growing artist community in Zimbabwe. He represented Zimbabwe at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) in the group pavilion Undone, curated by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, and showed a monumental textile installation at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025). Other institutional exhibitions include Avantgarde & Liberation at Mumok in Vienna (2024); Vestiges of Colonialism at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2023); Color is the First Revelation of the World at the Orange County Museum of Art (2024); This is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned at ARoS Museum, Denmark (2021); and Stormy Weather at Museum Arnhem, Netherlands (2019). His work is held in the collections of the Centre National d’Art Plastique in Paris, the Collection of Art of the European Parliament in Brussels, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and the CC Foundation in Shanghai, among others. He is represented by Nicodim in Los Angeles, New York, and Bucharest, and by Semiose in Paris.