Paivapo (There once was…)

A solo exhibition by Pyda Nyariri

Main Gallery: 18.06.26 - 30.07.26 

Paivapo is a Shona invocation that begins a journey with "There once was…" It serves as the threshold for this exhibition. It is a portal into a world where language is not merely a tool for communication, but a sentient migrating force embodied in the character known as Pidgin.

In this mythology, Pidgin acts as both a phantom and a physical manifestation of hybrid languages. We never witness Pidgin in the flesh; rather, we move through the exhibition as forensic investigators of its presence. We encounter Pidgin through the traces it leaves behind: the echoes of fractured syntax and the material residue of a body made from clay, water and cotton gauze.

 The gallery space is transformed into an immersive landscape where Pidgin’s Alphabet – a visual lexicon that transcendstraditional scripts – permeates throughout the space. These glyphs are the DNA of the pidginsed mind: part-memory, part-invention, and entirely necessary.

The atmosphere is bound together by audio alchemist Denise Onen. Her sound piece acts as the respiratory system of the installation, weaving together the sighs, stutters, and rhythmic pulses of a language in flux. It is the sound of the 'contact zone,' where the friction of different worlds generates a new, vibrating frequency and where mythology is given life.

Intertwined with these visual and auditory residues is a fictional text by Rabia Abba Omar. Her words provide thenarrative marrow for the exhibition, charting the movements of Pidgin across forgotten geographies and temporalities.

Paivapo invites the viewer to stop seeking a fixed identity and instead embrace the 'trace' and the opaque. It compels us to tell the story of how we speak when our mother tongues are taken, and how we dream in the languages we invent to survive. In the silence between the sounds and the spaces between the letters, we find the ghost of Pidgin — and perhaps, a reflection of our own hybrid selves.