Masks of Modernity: Cape Town Iteration
12 April - 16 August
This is not just an exhibition; it is a rupture in the fabric of conventional storytelling, an invitation to step into Samurai Farai’s world of radical expression.
The moment Samurai Farai entered this new space, the walls became more than surfaces—they became living, breathing extensions of his vision. With fearless strokes, he transforms them into a pulsating cosmos of color, form, and ancestral echoes. Here, masks are not mere artifacts of concealment but instruments of revelation, exposing the tension between heritage and the contemporary, between selfhood and the collective.
At its core, Masks of Modernity interrogates identity in a postcolonial African reality. Samurai Farai embraces the tensions of his Zimbabwean and Afrikaans heritage, forging a new, unbound visual language—one that blends tradition with Afrofuturism, abstraction with personal mythology. Through painting, sculpture, ceramics, and textiles, he carves out a space where the past and the future do not just coexist; they collide and recombine in electrifying new forms.
This iteration of the exhibition embraces maximalism not just as an aesthetic choice, but as a philosophical stance. In a world that often demands restraint, Farai insists on abundance. His work rejects the imposed minimalism of Western ideals and revels in excess—big color, big feeling, big meaning. Every line, every brushstroke is charged with an urgency to be seen, felt, and heard in full. His murals, layered with symbols and coded histories, are a declaration that African narratives cannot and should not be compressed into neat, digestible forms.
Farai’s art is a challenge to the expectation that African creativity must fit a predetermined mold. He moves fluidly across mediums and disciplines, crafting a universe where multiplicity is the norm, where masks are not only worn but wielded as tools for transformation. His figures—part-human, part-spirit—speak in tongues of memory and future prophecy, urging the viewer to embrace the contradictions within themselves.
Masks of Modernity is an ode to the messy, layered, and dynamic nature of African identity. It is a call to embrace complexity, to resist erasure, and to revel in the ever-shifting dance of past and future. Samurai Farai does not ask us to choose between tradition and innovation—he dares us to hold both, to sit in the tension, and to find power in the fullness of it all.
Welcome to a world unmasked.
