Traces We Carry by Tanaka Mazivanhanga
Exhibition Open:
Private View:
Thursday, 4th September 2025 | 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Exhibition Runs: 5th – 23rd September 2025 | Free Entry
Open Daily: 11:00am – 5:00pm ASC Gallery Artist Talk: 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Traces We Carry is Tanaka Mazivanhanga’s first solo exhibition at ASC Gallery, presented in recognition of the Bainbridge Print ASC Gallery Award. The exhibition reflects on the artist’s evolving sense of home, shaped by her migration journey to the United Kingdom at a young age from Zimbabwe. Through printmaking, casting, collage, and rubbings, the works explore ideas around the Diasporic experience of belonging, identity, place, and memory, asking: what does home mean when it exists in multiple geographies? Where do memories of home live, in people, places, or objects? How could our ideas of home be preserved, or is the concept of home an ever-changing one?
The works are rooted in direct, physical encounters with everyday spaces. Rubbings from walls, floors, and surfaces, re-tracing sites of personal significance that marked the artist’s first days in the UK, alongside domestic interiors where family life continues to unfold. Clay objects preserve the fragile marks of everyday happenings and memory within the home; a latex cast of the artist’s front door, embedded with family photographs, becomes both a site of continuity and a threshold between public and private life.
Collaged prints stitch together fragments of Zimbabwean and British landscapes, combining the warm earth tones of Zimbabwe with vibrant hues drawn from London’s urban fabric, mapping a layered sense of belonging across geographies. How do objects, foods, and cultural symbols carry identity across borders? Family archives, totems, cooking utensils, and passports reveal the various ways memory and identity are sustained and re-imagined, echoing the objects migrants often carry across continents as vessels of home.
By bringing together rubbings, casts, collages, and archival material, Traces We Carry preserves not only material imprints of physical place but also the emotional landscapes of migration. In these works, home is understood through the lens of life’s impermanence, both physical and re-imagined, shaped not only by where we come from but also by what, whom, and where we carry ourselves.
Biography
Tanaka Mazivanhanga is a Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist. She holds a BA in Architecture from Kingston School of Art and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts. Her practice explores memory, migration, and belonging, focusing on traces of stories and histories embedded in familiar yet evolving spaces. She has exhibited widely and received numerous awards, including the Bainbridge Print/ASC Gallery Award, which has led to her first solo exhibition at ASC Gallery, Traces We Carry. She will also present her second solo exhibition with the Barbican Arts Group Trust at the ArtWorks Project Space in October.