In November 2017, Kudzanai 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 longstanding former President Robert Mugabe was being ousted through a military-led coup, Chiurai was exhibiting his politically-driven work, which combines art 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 continued curation of Candice Allison, Madness and Civilization re-stages this exhibition alongside new works and research that highlights Chiurai’s creative projects over the past two years. It takes its title from Michel Foucault’s seminal 1964 text, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. In so doing, the exhibition maintains Chiurai’s practice of revisiting and rejecting ‘colonial futures’, which fuel the notion that Africans should think, speak, and act like their colonizers.
Fashioned in the likeness of screen-printed propaganda critical of white supremacy in 1970’s 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.
In addition, Madness and Civilization will present a selection of images from Chiurai’s photographic series, Genesis [Je n’isi isi](2016) and, We Live in Silence (2017). The gallery’s video room will feature the film, We Live in Silence: Chapters 1-7, which recently screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, and later this year will head to the Rencontres du Film Court de Madagascar and Dak’Art Biennale. Several listening stations will also offer visitors the chance to browse Chiurai’s library of vinyl records, which include a selection of Zimbabwean Chimurenga and South African anti-apartheid struggle music, as well as rare recordings of speeches by Ian Smith, Kwame Nkrumah, Mobutu Sese Seko, Dr Martin Luther King, author Alex Haley, and a dramatic re-enactment of the trial of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale.
Artworks
Create a Goodman Gallery account to view pricing of available artworks and access purchasing.
Artist Bio
Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Harare, Zimbabwe) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring notions and cycles of political, economic, and social strife present in postcolonial societies. His work interrogates urgent social issues, such as xenophobia, exile, displacement, the psychological experiences of urban spaces, as well as the Western imprint on Africa.
In 2024, Chiurai’s film We Live in Silence (Chapters 1 - 7) was on view as part of the main exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale Stranieri Ovunque – 'Foreigners Everywhere,' curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In 2023, photographs from the artist’s 'We Live in Silence' series were part of 'A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography,' at TATE Modern curated by Osei Bonsu.
In 2013, Chiurai’s 'Conflict Resolution' series was exhibited at DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) in Kassel and the film 'Iyeza' was one of the few African films to be included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the Sundance Film Festival.
Chiurai’s project, 'The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember,' is built around his collecting practice which focuses on preserving archives and memorialising social and cultural history from southern Africa. The project exists in the form of an archive of materials situated in Johannesburg including vinyl, posters, paintings and more, drawn from private African collections. Each time this archive is exhibited, Chiurai invites a different librarian to interrogate the archive and curate an exhibition.
Solo exhibitions include: 'Genesis [Je n’isi isi], We Live in Silence,' IFA, Stuttgart (2019); 'Madness and Civilization,' Kalmar Konsmuseum, Sweden (2018); 'Now and Then: Guercino and Kudzanai Chiurai,' Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2018); and 'Regarding the Ease of Others,' Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2017).
Group shows include: 'FLIGHT,' Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2023); 'Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream,' Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); 'Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier,' Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); 'The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited,' Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014) and travelled to the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2015); 'Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography,' Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); and 'Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now,' Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011).
Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Walther Collection, New York; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.
Chiurai lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.
