Mozambique’s Reinata Sadimba breaks retirement to portray contemporary woman

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Mozambique’s Reinata Sadimba breaks retirement to portray contemporary woman

11:03 CAT | 12 Jun 2017

Reinata Sadimba, the most respected ceramist in Mozambique, has given in to art and broken her two-year retirement to return with 30 works for an exhibition that celebrates the condition of contemporary woman.

For the 62-year-old artist, the exhibition is a double return: she returns to showing her works, and also to the Brazil-Mozambique Cultural Centre (CCBM) in Maputo, where she held her first individual show in 1993.

“The CCBM gave me my first support and, morally, it is home. I started when I held my first solo exhibition here,” Sadimba told Lusa.

Her new exhibition will open on Wednesday and run until June 27.

Reinata points out that in her two years of retirement, which she initially thought would be indefinite, she saw the Mozambican woman strengthen her role in society through a greater involvement in politics and economy.

These social transformations, she explains, are evident in the clay, graphite and white powder works, material that always characterised the artist’s work.

“The material is the same. It’s clay, graphite and white powder. The difference is the way it’s done. In the past years, women’s participation in parliament was reduced, but women’s issues are now approached in a positive way,” she says.

Moreover, between 75 to 80 percent of the works in the “Ninerudi” exhibition (“I came back” in the northern Mozambique Maconde language) focus on the situation of women.

Before her retirement, she says, her work was dominated by the suffering, anguish and exclusion to which Mozambican women are subjected.

After giving up on her first attempt at retirement, Sadimba says she will now let her art flow without deadlines. She has a second exhibition in Mozambique and another one in Lisbon, Portugal, towards the end of the year.

Born in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, the daughter of peasants, Sadimba received a traditional Maconde education, which included clay sculpture. In the 1970s, her pieces became known worldwide.

Sadimba had a very productive stage during her exile in Tanzania from 1980 to 1992, and since then, she has produced sculpture in Maputo. Sadimba has works in the National Museum of Art and the Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, in the Collection of Modern Art at Culturgest and in private collections around the world.