Pardon Mapondera creates art for an ailing world. His woven waste sculptures, deceptively simple in their materiality and methodical in their craftmanship, speak at once to waning African spiritualities, post-colonial ecologies, and contemporary systems of trade and extraction. All of this is evident in his Artist Room with SMAC Gallery, Light of the Darkness.

Born and raised in Chitungwiza, a small town outside of Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, Mapondera is best-known for his striking and disquieting works made with discarded materials and found objects. From these byproducts of industrial trade – plastic waste, packaging material, string lights and more – he weaves together abstract soft sculptures that, when illuminated, emerge as a warning, or an invitation to remember.

For Mapondera, a graduate of Zimbabwe’s National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design, Light of the Darkness comes at a time when his career is undergoing significant growth. Fresh off a 2025 Indibano Art Residency in Dallas, Texas where he refined his material practice on a smaller scale, Mapondera recently arrived in Cape Town to work on bigger, more ambitious pieces with scaled up materials. Following his Artist Room with SMAC, he goes on to exhibit in Venice, as one of five artists selected for the Zimbabwean Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, in an exhibition focusing on the relationship between humanity and technology, and the natural and the synthetic world.

His intuitive, material-led practice has long highlighted themes of ecology and renewal. Citing Sankofa, Mapondera’s working philosophy is that of returning to one’s roots, and relearning one’s history, in order to move forward. It is here that the impetus for Light of the Darkness is located.

Mapondera views artmaking as an act of healing. “I have a spiritual gift within me,” explains the artist at his studio in De Waterkant, Cape Town. “For me to realise that, and to follow my gift and my spiritual journey, I’ve had to express it through my art.”

So, it is the found, the readymade, that becomes a way of working for Mapondera. But as Clement Emeka Akpang argues, there can be no universal theory for found objects in contemporary African art. Rather, as is the case with Mapondera’s practice, an appropriation of found objects can be used to foster a new kind of decolonial activism by critiquing the ongoing legacies of colonialism – culturally, materially, environmentally.

Though gestalt-like, always gesturing towards their many disparate parts, Mapondera’s works cannot be reverse-engineered, speaking at once to his process of working with reclaimed and rewoven fragments, and his belief in the interconnected nature of the world. Threaded throughout all of his works is fine, red thread. “For me it symbolises life, blood, passion, danger, and destruction – the things that animate and change our lives,” he explains. It also speaks to his practice of care, in response to a community or a world in crisis.

Crucially, these are not hostile works, but objects of cleansing. The sculptures in Light of the Darkness are emblematic of the toxic material and spiritual affects that Mapondera wishes to remove from the world. In this way, each work serves as a conversation about the translation of matter, of memory, and of meaning towards healing.

Take, for example, the work Kukuzva, which bristles with its haul of plastic and wooden beads, doll heads, dish towels and charms. Echoing the practice of Zimbabwean net fishing, Mapondera has cast his net, pulled it back in, and found it charged with the ills of the world – pollution, bewitchment, and all of the leavings of extractive industry and trade.

In another work, Hosha, a cluster of plastic drinking straws and rubber tubes group together like a teeming vespiary. Lit up with pulsing red lights signalling life emerging from darkness, the sculpture is equal parts corporeal and alien, a hybrid human and plastic form.

False prophets preying on the fears and vulnerabilities of their communities do not escape Mapondera’s critique either. In Silent Noise, reams of red thread hang from a knot of melted and pierced plastic bottles. The warped forms, explains Mapondera, speak for those who are manipulated and silenced by these false prophets.

If Mapondera’s use of plastic is a metaphor for a polluted spiritual life, the forms he creates put forward a way of thinking about African contemporaneity as a period of great contamination and disconnection, while gesturing, always, towards resolution. Mapondera is able to craft great beauty from waste, and fashion new beginnings out of a fractured past.