THROUGH ITS CURRENT exhibition, First Floor Gallery Harare is investigating the significance of textiles through the imaginations of six women artists and positioning the medium as a powerful vessel for storytelling. The show’s title, “Nariti,” a Shona word meaning needle, serves not as a theme but as a ground zero from which various narratives are woven.
On view until 30 July 2025, the exhibition is composed of pieces by Shamilla Aasha, Berry Bickle, Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Kresiah Mukwazhi, Anne Zanele Mutema and Miriro Mwandiambira, with the eye of the needle as their focal points.
Throughout the gallery, the artworks stand as distinct as their makers, each with unique identifiers and motifs. Fabrics superimposed on beaded text for Bickle, string-drawn contours and holes for Kufakwatenzi, and threaded connections bound in circles for Aasha. In Mwandiambira’s pieces, paint and fabric coexist in stilettos and stiletto-clad legs.
“For me, the stiletto is where everything began,” said Mwandiambira, 30, who co-curated "Nariti” alongside Valerie Kabov, the gallery's director, and textile artist Georgina Maxim. If it were up to Mwandiambira, the exhibition would’ve been titled “Genesis” or, in Shona, “Mavambo.”
Featured in every one of her five pieces in the exhibition, the stiletto motif dates back to her childhood, during which she saw her mum wear high heels in her daily life or while going to work. And, before Mwandiambira was a visual artist, she was a performer. On stage, she used stilettos to juxtapose the imagery of a housewife with that of a woman trying to break free of that mould.
Mwandiambira’s dad is a self-taught tailor and fashion designer, and this familial connection to nariti also played a vital role in her craft. As a young girl, Mwandiambira would sneakily collect his leftover fabric scraps and use them in her artwork. This reclamation and recycling of handed-down textiles features in her pieces “Raive Teneti (My maternity outfit), Part 1” and “Raive Teneti (My maternity outfit), Part 2”, which make use of materials from the maternity clothes she wore during her pregnancy.
“I started using them, cutting them up to be part of my artwork as well, to remind me of my journey into motherhood, to remind me of weaving,” she said. “Because nariti is a definition of weaving, using a needle [to prick] something.”
There is a definitive sense of movement in Mwandiambira’s pieces. There are no straight lines; only curves and arches and meanders, even in the heels of the shoes, creating a carefree dynamism. The blocking of patterns — painted and made of fabric — lends each artwork an innocence that echoes the artist’s interpretation of "Nariti” as where things began.
In Zimbabwe, textiles and their makers aren’t discussed enough, Mwandiambira said, and a key part of the country's history is lost because of it. Where Zambia and South Africa, for example, have defined cultural garments often visible on their residents, Zimbabwe lacks a similar display of local dress.
“We do not have that sense of appreciating our own textiles here…The textiles that we have here are acquired aesthetics,” she said. “But then what about us? What do we have that belongs to us, that we can say, ‘This is our national dress. This is our own textile. This is what we can play with. This is what we can manipulate in the sense of ours, in the sense of tradition, in the sense of creating?’”
This textile-focused exhibition opens up the way for this line of questioning.
Spotlighting women in "Nariti” was a no-brainer, said Kabov, “especially since overwhelmingly the textile artists that we are familiar with in Zimbabwe are women, and we thought that there is something to explore there.”
Women-centric exhibitions are nothing new at First Floor, where half of the institution’s artists are women. As is the case in the gallery's other shows, Mwandiambira and her peers were encouraged to present their work without constraint or adherence to a theme.
“All artists at First Floor have to have the space and the agency to speak on their own terms,” Kabov said. “We wanted to find out if shared ideas and conversations could emerge when these independent works are brought together,” she added.
The prevalence of women in the textile and garment industry stems from an assumption that sewing, crocheting, knitting and weaving are generally reserved for women. “Nariti” flips that expectation on its head, presenting needlework not as a relegation or a pastime but as a means through which women artists make their voices heard by stitching together stories of their choosing.
"Nariti,” Kabov said, could be a model for the gallery's future shows.
“We want to continue this kind of practice of [a] more institutional curatorial approach to our exhibition, while maintaining our solo exhibition schedule,” she said. “This gives us the freedom to play with fun ideas in a different way and also to engage with new artists and new audiences.”
