Kudzanai ChiuraiOctober, 2019
Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice adopts a revisionist approach to disrupt what he describes as “colonial futures,” embedding counter-histories that challenge the gaps and erasures left by the colonial project. His work offers a renewed lens through which to consider visual culture in Africa, advancing the broader decolonial discourse by foregrounding political realities, social complexities, and marginalised voices.
‘October’ forms part of ‘Paintings and Drawings from the Radical Archive’, a series which draws influence from Michel Foucault’s 1964 text ‘Madness and Civilisation’. Continuing Chiurai’s long-standing inquiry into dismantling colonial ideologies, the series critiques the enduring belief that Africans should think, speak, and act according to colonial standards. The drawings are styled after screen-printed propaganda posters from 1970s Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, historically used to challenge white minority rule. Chiurai layers these works with found photographs, letters, and fragments from ‘The Kaffirs Illustrated’, a reprinted folio of 19th-century watercolours produced in 1849. Across each surface, he inscribes imagined letters authored by Foucault, exploring madness as a colonial construct – one that, in Chiurai’s view, justified imperial conquest and continues to shape the failures of post-colonial African nation-states. In this body of work, Chiurai reclaims the archive as a space of resistance, memory, and speculative re-narration.
