My general report and thoughts on Cheuka Art Fair (CHAF), 2025 are in my associated blog, please do visit that and enjoy the read…..

Burnt Offerings Collective at Cheuka Harare Art Fair (CHAF) February 2025….

After my attendance at FNB art fair, Johannesburg in September 2025, I am only now truly appreciating and processing the lasting impact that this brave and honest ‘Cheuka’ art fair initiative has made on so many of us Zimbabwean artists, collectives, curators and collectors…and on our Burnt Offerings Art Collective in particular.

‘Cheuka’ (a shona word; to look, to take NOTICE, to observe both the tangible and the intangible things around us) is truly an apt name for this art event, anticipated to be held yearly. Conceived and co-ordinated by Wallen Mapondera, Admire Kamudzengerere and Merilyn Mushakwe, and curated by Laura Fungai Ganda of the Creative Lounge Trust, Cheuka Harare Art Fair 2025 (CHAF) was created by artists, for artists. A brave and innovative move in a tight economy, bringing the attention of the world to Zimbabwe, to Africa.

What a roller coaster this was, as in the last few months of 2024 and the first few months of 2025 it was all go for our Burnt Offerings Collective (Lin Kelli and Johnson) to finalise work for the inaugural CHAF. Working at all hours, in studio and in garden, we prepared our offerings…

When the setting up day dawned on us, the tight reality of hiring the space, (the Andy Miller Hall, Harare Showgrounds), on a constrained budget for a few days only, meant that the visionary organizers were heroically allocating booths, Mr Gweshe and team painting, hammering and creating the booths, as artists arrived to help construct booths, lend hammers and tapes, and install works…and it all came together with grace and minimal frayed tempers, in typical good-willed Zimbabwean style!

Burnt Offerings Collective booth at the Cheuka Art Fair (CHAF) 2025, this video shows setting up, (Admire Kamudzengerere of Animal Farm Artist residency, Jo and Josefina of Beta Gallery, in the background, and listen for the sound of last minute hammering!…)

As Burnt Offerings Collective, we are three fellow artists……

Lin Barrie, painter, mixed media artist

Johnson Zuze, sculptor, wire and found objects artist

Kelli Barker, painter and body/make up artist

Our Burnt Offerings Collective Concept for CHAF: 

Our “Burnt Offerings Collective” exhibition at the Cheuka Art Fair 2025 displays three artistic points of view, (reflecting our theme of ‘flight’); and is asking viewers to ‘notice’ our three interpretations of intangible emotion portrayed by tangible materials; canvas, snare wire, found objects, acrylic and oil paints, body paints, photographic archival prints. As collaborating artists, Lin Barrie, Johnson Zuze, and Kelli Barker, we created immersive installations of canvas and paper artworks, wire and found objects sculptures, and photographic archival prints of film and body art.

We invite viewers to CHEUKA! Notice! Look, Look and Look Again!

Our Burnt Offerings Collective display proposal…..(most booths were 4 x 4 x 3 metres):

Burnt Offerings Collective exhibition booth at the Cheuka Art Fair (CHAF) 2025, various views….

(the full catalogue of Burnt Offerings Collective artworks is at the end of this blog)

Our exhibition celebrates the ability within all of us to NOTICE!… to Look at the tangible, to Look at the intangible, to Look at creative ways to rise above the physical and metaphorical fires and trials of life; to never stop truly LOOKING.

I wrote and displayed poetry to support our artworks…..

Cheuka! Notice!……

To look with our hands

to hear with our voices

to feel with our eyes

to taste with our touch

to speak with our ears

to spread our wings

to see the impossible

as possible………

the intangible

as tangible………..

Lin Barrie

Looking at flight in all its nuances (observing, celebrating and feeling flight, is often a common thread in our Burnt Offerings collaborative works).

Looking to our mentors, our angels, our ancestors; inspired by the legacy they leave us, and the wind they offer us to lift and spread our wings.

Looking at overcoming; rising above the travails of life, the tragedies and challenges….

Looking at ngano, fables and tales from antiquity; relevant always in a modern sense.

(tales of such as the Njuzu, (Njuzi), a Zimbabwean water-being with powers to suck people below the surface to live as ‘mermaids’, and of the Greek legend of Icarus, who, with wings of feathers and wax, foolishly flew too close to the sun and crashed when his wax wings melted… )

Looking to our art practice, our Burnt Offerings Collective, I write poetry inspired by our artworks:

Burnt Offerings

of canvas, wire and skin;

physical imaginings

become art reality, 

myth reinvented.

Coils of wire

twisted, twined

embracing life

delineating death. 

Painted flesh,

painted canvas,

looped wire,

wire to wings, 

wings to canvas.

Look; Cheuka!..

Art resurrected,

wire and canvas

and flesh in flight….

Look, Cheuka!..

an African Icarus

uplifted, bouyed by

hopeful invention.

And unlike Icarus

we do NOT fly too high,

we acknowledge mortality 

in the fierce glare

of the waiting sun.

We simply create

within our means.

Spoken word, poem by Lin Barrie

Here follow some moments captured at our booth at CHAF 2025……

Johnson Zuze and Njuzu, Resurrection, snare wire and found objects, at our booth…

Poet, writer, publisher and fellow artist Samantha Vazhure visits Burnt Offerings Collective booth……..

A joy, sharing our art and poetry with fellow artists and public….

Our booth visited by Zimbabwean writer, master wordsmith Tinsashe Muchuri…

Lin admiring Kelli Barker, Flight I and 2, archival photographic prints on stretched canvas…….

As you will have seen from our written concept, the power of Flight, physical and metaphorical, the value of NOTICING our potentials, is a common thread between the artworks that we display at CHAF.

Portraits; Kelli Barker, Johnson Zuze, Lin Barrie;

Here are our ARTIST STATEMENTS:

CATALOGUE: Burnt Offerings Collective

Name: Lin Barrie 

Title: Look to your wings…. 

Medium: Acrylic and oil pastel on draped/loose canvas 

Dimensions: 155 cm x 260 cm 

Year 2025 

Name: Lin Barrie 

Title: Look, Look Again; Emergence, diptych, 

Medium: acrylic/charcoal monotypes on paper, 

Dimensions: 91 x 64 cm each painting size, 

Year: 2023 

Name: Kelli Barker 

Title: Flight I 

Medium: archival photographic print on canvas 

Dimensions: A1 

Year 2023 

Name: Kelli Barker 

Title: Flight II 

Medium: archival photographic print on canvas 

Dimensions: A1 

Year: 2023 

Name: Johnson Zuze 

Title: Njuzu, Resurrection 

Medium: snare wire and found objects 

Dimensions: 170 cm height, 240 cm width 

Year: 2023 

Name: Johnson Zuze 

Title: Moment for Ancestor Worship (In memory of mentor and mother, Helen Lieros, Gallery Delta)

Medium: snare wire and found objects 

Dimensions: 100 cm height, 200 cm width 

Year: 2023 

Name: Johnson Zuze 

Title: CHEUKA! Bird or Bottle? 1 

Medium: snare wire and found objects 

Dimensions: 30 x 30 cm 

Year 2023 

Name: Johnson Zuze 

Title: CHEUKA! Bird or Bottle? 2 

Medium: snare wire and found objects 

Dimensions: 30 x 30 cm 

Year 2023 

PS: Some of my supporting sketches/art works, created in preparation for the art fair but not displayed within the physical space constraints of the Art Fair, are noted below,

Lin Barrie, Wings 1 and 2 (diptych) Acrylic/oil pastel on loose canvas, (30,5 x 40,6 cm each)

Lin Barrie, Flight 1 and 2 (diptych), Acrylic and oil pastel on acrylic paper, (30,5 x 40,6 cm each)

Lin Barrie, Blue Man, Wings of Wire 1, monoprint, Mixed media on brown craft paper, 64 x 91 cm

Lin Barrie, Blue Man, Wings of Wire 2, monoprint, Mixed media on brown craft paper, 64 x 91 cm

Lin Barrie, Chrysalis 1 and 2 (diptych), Acrylic and oil pastel on acrylic paper, 40,6 cm x 30,5 cm..

Lin sketching and Johnson twisting wire…..!

Lin Barrie, Moment for Ancestor Worship 1, monoprint,

mixed media on brown craft paper, 45,5 x 32 cm …

Lin Barrie, Moment for Ancestor Worship 2, monoprint,

mixed media on brown craft paper, 45,5 x 32 cm ….

We invite viewers to :

CHEUKA! Notice! Look, Look and Look Again!

and as a parting PostScript:

We got ‘noticed’ with our tongue-in-cheek art statement at CHAF, as we emulated ‘Comedian’, a famous (infamous) international art assemblage, by taping our whole spare lunchtime banana plus a used banana skin, to the wall of our booth…..

The used skin especially fitted our Chaf ‘flight’ theme very well, as it looked ready to fly off the wall….

Many viewers and especially children asked piercing and pertinent questions about the banana,

…. some requesting that they could consume it … and indignant that it would cost a lot to eat….)

Comedian is a 2019 conceptual artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Created in an edition of three, it appears as a fresh banana duct taped to a wall. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, after spending $6.2m on artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall, then proceeded to eat the fruit.

Cheuka…

Look, Take Note;

What is ART after all?!