Art of shunning colonialism
WITH his ongoing interest in the cyclical nature of struggle, liberation and freedom, Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s latest exhibition, Madness and Civilization, rejects “colonial futures”, which fuel the notion that Africans should think, speak and act like their colonisers.
The exhibition, which opens at the Goodman Gallery on April 12, is made up of new mixed-media drawings, a series of photographs and in the Video Room, We Live in Silence: Chapters 1-7 (which recently screened at the Berlin International Film Festival).
The exhibition takes its title from Michel Foucault’s seminal text, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
For Chiurai, the ideas contained within this work relate to a central concern of his, regarding whether the colonial project of “cultural disarmament” was so effective that Africa will never be able to imagine a future that has not been pre-determined by its colonial past.
Last November, Chiurai’s first solo exhibition in his home country, We Need New Names, went on view at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Its timing was prescient. While the country’s long-standing president, Robert Mugabe, was ousted through a military-led coup, Chiurai was exhibiting his politically driven work, which combines art and historical imagery with references from popular culture and archival material to explore the visual language and tropes that help construct myths, history and ultimately power.
Under the curatorship of Candice Allison, Madness and Civilization restages this exhibition alongside new works and research that highlight Chiurai’s creative projects over the past two years.
The entry point into Madness and Civilization is a new series of mixed-media drawings.
Fashioned in the likeness of screen-printed propaganda critical of white supremacy in 1970s Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, the drawings are collaged with found letters, photographs and images torn from The Kaffirs Illustrated, a reprinted folio of watercolour paintings originally produced in 1849.
On top of each drawing, Chiurai has inscribed imagined letters by Foucault, writing on the intrinsic nature of madness – a diagnosis, Chiurai believes, was used to motivate colonial expansion and white minority rule in Africa and continues to serve as a contributing factor to the failure of post-colonial African nation states.
The exhibition opens at the Goodman Gallery, Woodstock, on April 12; Chiurai will be in conversation with writer and art critic Khanya Mashabela at the gallery on April 14.
Rejects notion Africans should think, speak, and act like their colonisers