Simchowitz is pleased to present Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda (Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going), a solo exhibition by Julio Rizhi at Hill House in Pasadena. The exhibition opens Sunday, October 11th.
The title Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda—Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going—looks backward and forward at once. It considers the people, places, and histories that form us alongside the futures we imagine for ourselves. Migration, both as lived experience and inherited memory, provides the exhibition’s central thread.
Rizhi’s mother is from Malawi, with ties to Chewa culture and the traditions of Gule Wamkulu; his late father was Nyungwe and came from Mozambique. They migrated to Zimbabwe, where Rizhi was born. His father’s accounts of that journey became an early family archive - one that later prompted the artist to study histories of migration across Southern Africa.
In Rizhi’s work, this personal history opens onto a broader account of movement as both necessity and aspiration. People cross borders in search of work, shelter, security, and opportunity, but the journey is never only a passage from one place to another. It also carries forms of knowledge: memories, customs, stories, and ways of making that adapt without disappearing.
That process of adaptation is embedded in Rizhi’s material language. Drawing on the structures and rhythms of pottery and weaving, he moves from research and sketching to forms built from mesh and wire. Plastic is then layered, heated, colored, and worked by hand. A material associated with consumption and waste becomes pliable, tactile, and unexpectedly alive.
Color is equally purposeful. Rizhi returns to vivid tones because, as he says, “the future is bright.” Yet the optimism is not weightless: it is carried by a material with a previous life and by structures that remain visibly under tension. Hope emerges here as something made and remade; a practical act rather than a decorative theme.
The exhibition brings together twenty-two works made between 2020 and 2024, ranging from intimate wall-mounted pieces to expansive sculptural forms. Titles including The Chakafukidza Part 6, Dream Land, and Mapping The Now Part 5 frame questions of shelter, ambition, and the present tense. Seen together, the works form a layered record of family, movement, survival, and possibility: where we come from, what travels with us, and what we might build next.
Julio Rizhi (b. 1991) lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. He studied at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s visual art studio before developing an experimental practice centered on found and discarded materials. His work examines the social and environmental pressures of urban life while testing how those materials can hold memory, tension, and possibility.