Stories of failed states and whitewashed victims
Kudzanai Chiurai’s latest exhibition, We Live in Silence, comprises two parts: four new films (to be launched at Constitution Hill this weekend) and broadly derived from them, a series of prints, paintings and installations (which opened at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg last week).
The split sites and differing durations of these two components suggest that they may be assessed and interpreted independently. This also affords the pleasure of changing opinions, of alternative insights; next week, once I have seen the films at Constitution Hill, I am sure my understanding of the material displayed at the Goodman Gallery will shift.
For now, I am struck by the silence of the still images — dramatic scenes frozen into motionless tableaux. In particular, there is the ambiguous gaze of Botshelo Motuba, who portrays the central “character” in most of Chiurai’s arrangements.
She stares directly at the camera and thus at the artist as well as the viewer; she is simultaneously a part of, and removed from, the activity around her.
This figure takes on various incarnations. She is Christ at the Last Supper, Christ crucified, Christ resurrected and showing her wounds. She is a precolonial leader, a missionary, a colonial administrator. She is an object on display in a human zoo, a politician in front of microphones, a plutocrat surrounded by opulence.
To insert black women into these iconographic depictions is, according to the artist’s description, one way of staging “alternative colonial histories” — creating “countermemories” — so as to reimagine postcolonial futures. And indeed, Chiurai’s images are so richly allusive, so vivid, that they do spark new ways of thinking about the relationship between the past and the years that lie ahead.
Yet there is also a sense in which these images collectively tell an all-too-familiar story. This is expressed most crudely in the triptych Transfer of Ownership, in which three contracts, duly signed and sealed, document the sale of the slave “Azania” by the Dutch East India Company to the British South Africa Company, thence to the National Party and, finally, to the ANC.
Such are the depths to which the ANC has fallen that it is tempting to think of the damage the party is now doing simply as a continuation of the theft, exploitation and cruelty of the past 400 years. But this temptation must be resisted, because it implies a neat equivalence that does a disservice both to SA’s complicated current moment and to the twists and turns of history that preceded it.
The other works in We Live in Silence are more nuanced. In response to the title of the exhibition, they seem to ask: who are “we”? And what does it mean to “live in silence”?
The faces and bodies portray such divergent historical and contemporary figures — saviours and mourners, conqueror and conquered, fashionistas and servants, lovers and clergy — that “we” are all drawn into a circle of “silence” and complicity.
Chiurai’s influences are panAfrican and his interests seem to coalesce around two disputable but nonetheless common African narratives.
One is of the failed state presided over by a liberatorturned-tyrant, which is of course familiar to him from his native Zimbabwe (he lives in exile because he was threatened after criticising the Mugabe regime). The other is of disoriented and insecure African colonial or postcolonial subjects, “whitewashed blacks”, desperately trying to fit into a white world that does not want to accommodate them.
This is the premise of Med Hondo’s 1967 film Soleil O, which tackles the problem from a Francophone African perspective and is one of Chiurai’s key references in this exhibition. We Live in Silence has, however, a tangibly and specifically South African point of departure. His “alternative colonial histories” are overlaid on archival fragments of orthodox colonial history: sketches of “A Caffre Woman”, maps of the Eastern Cape and so on.
One installation touches on a national open wound with a combination of sardonic humour and lyrical complaint. Visitors are encouraged to enter the Land Claims Confessional, presumably to admit to their own wrongdoing or to report that of others. Inside the booth, finally, is a voice that won’t be silenced, claiming a deep attachment to lost land.