WHOSE

BACK

AGAINST

MY

BACK?

Cheuka Harare Art Fair (CHAF) was started in 2025 as a platform to promote and celebrate the visual arts sector in Harare and beyond.
The goal of Harare Art Fair is to celebrate creativity,  to foster creative  and economic growth in the local arts sector, as well as  offering a platform for diverse forms of artistic expression.
This year's theme is titled 'WHOSE BACK AGAINST MY BACK'. Two people stand back-to-back. They face different directions yet remain in contact. Each watches over a field the other cannot see. This is not a pose of comfort. It is a practice of trust. You feel the body behind you without watching it. You offer protection to someone whose heart you cannot fully read, and accept their protection on the same terms. The condition is reciprocity: neither body becomes a shield for the other; neither person turns the other into a view. Then comes the gift neither could produce alone: the field doubles. What one cannot see, the other is already watching. Yet standing back-to-back is not only a defensive formation. It is also a way of working. It is how weight is carried, tools are passed, knowledge travels and exhausted bodies find rest. It does not require everyone to face the same direction. Solidarity is not sameness. We may hold different positions, inherit different histories and imagine different horizons without abandoning one another.   The fair is therefore not only a place in which objects are displayed. It is a gathering, a temporary assembly of living infrastructures: studios, friendships, arguments, exchanges, memories and unfinished acts of care. It asks whether an art fair can be more than a marketplace, whether it can become a place where value circulates without separating the work from the communities that made it possible.

The Team

  • Wallen Mapondera

    Wallen Mapondera is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates work through painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. He is best known for his complex wall sculptures which create richly tessellated abstract surfaces out of cardboard and textiles. These works challenge the linearity of time and history, transfiguring ordinary materials into textured visual puzzles. Mapondera  is the co-founder and Director of Post Studio Arts Collective where he  runs the art residency programs which focuses on critical thinking and professional practice in art. He is concerned and passionate about how knowledge is passed from generation to generation and is interested in noticing what is lost during the process.

  • Admire Kamudzengerere

    Admire Kamudzengerere’s  work explores identity, politics, and society, often informed by the structural and social issues that have marked Zimbabwe’s last decades. Kamudzengerere has gone on to create a powerful and broad range of works that consists of painting, drawing, performance, installation, video, and printmaking. His art, intense and indefinable, addresses universal themes like father-son relationships, displacement, and the position of an African artist within the global art world. Kamudzengerere is the founder of Animal Farm Artist Residency, an initiative that serves as a space for creative experimentation and artistic development, often hosting international exchanges and collaborating with local art collectives. 

The Curators

Lifang Zhang

Beijing, China

SPECIAL PROJECT

Lifang Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tsinghua University, Lifang’s research explores contemporary African art and Afro-Asian artistic engagements. With a background in Art History from Rhodes University, she brings a research-driven perspective to CHAF, having curated projects including Viable Visions: Retrospective of Martin Abasi Phiri (1957–1997) and If These Walls Could Talk.

Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi)

Paris, France

MAIN SECTION

Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, DJ, researcher and curator whose practice spans sound, painting, collage, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Rooted in African knowledge systems, post-apartheid transitionalism and global underground subcultures.

Known for his Globalisto philosophy and key contributions to Afro-Electronic music, Bopape’s international practice includes exhibitions and performances at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Dakar Biennale, Grand Palais, Paris, and the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial. His curatorial projects explore the intersections of African histories, sound, culture and contemporary artistic practice.

Kemang Wa Lehulere

Cape Town, South Africa

MAIN SECTION

Kemang Wa Lehulere is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, drawing and performance. Using found and salvaged materials, he transforms everyday objects such as school desks, tyres, chalkboards and ceramic dogs into poetic explorations of personal memory, collective histories and cultural erasure.

His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI, Art Institute of Chicago and Göteborg Konsthall, and featured in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennale and Lyon Biennale. He is also a co-founder of Gugulective and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments, and has received numerous major awards for his artistic practice.