Tamari Kudita, a Zimbabwean photographer and art decorator, was recently announced as the winner of the 2021 Sony World Photography Award for a work in her series, ‘African Victoria’.
The individual picture in her African Victoria series, which earned her the $5000 prize in the creative category, is an unusual merger of two cultures — a young woman, dressed in Victorian apparel, holding the traditional cooking utensils of the Shona people of Zimbabwe.
Through her works, Tamary tells The Sole Adventurer, she wants to show African history as multifaceted.
“The African narrative has been paraded under the same monolith of cultural homogeneity…And my hope is to show that apart from being complex, the African experience is a tapestry woven in real time by each and every one of us,” she said.
Kudita has been in the art scene for a while, having participated in exhibitions in South Africa and her home country, Zimbabwe. Her first solo exhibition, in 2018, studied race and representation and was exhibited at the PH Centre Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.