Zimbabwe Pavilion

Pardon Mapondera is the youngest of the five artists in the Pavilion of Zimbabwe, and in many respects the most formally unexpected. Mapondera has built a practice out of the material that contemporary consumer society discards: plastic bottles, straws, thread, and other recycled detritus that he transforms, with extraordinary patience and formal intelligence, into complex textile compositions that are visually arresting and conceptually urgent. His practice is, at one level, an act of ecological witness: Mapondera's choice of materials refuses to let us look away from the consequences of consumption. Mapondera does not merely assert his beliefs, he challenges fundamental assumptions about reality, and in the process redefines his role as an artist.