In award-winning artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s State of the Nation, the notion of “state” is explored as a utopia and an action, a state of mind as well as a status. This exhibition took place at two venues: a warehouse on Gwi Gwi Mrwebi Street in Newtown and Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main. Between the two venues, the show featured photographic prints, drawings, large oil paintings, video, sound installation and performance with a focus on youth culture. State of the Nation proposed fresh ways of looking at the socio-politics of Africa today. It explored the African condition by juxtaposing the past and the present of a continent in the grip of violent civil wars.
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“On a continent that has experienced more violent conflict than any other, this exhibition follows an individual’s narration of events that lead up to the inaugural speech by the first supposedly democratically elected prime minister. This leader styled along many of our existing African leaders, retells the history of a people from another time, but still Africa’s time…” says the artist.
With Melissa Mboweni as curator of the project and collaborations with photographer Jurie Potgieter and singers Thandiswa Mazwai and Zaki Ibrahim, Chiurai references child soldiers, African liberation movements, and civil wars. He tracks the similarities in the societal, political and ideological fabric of states in tumultuous times of transition. Notions of public and private are raised in performances taking place in the streets of Newtown and in basements with limited access. A sound installation scores the gallery experience. Representations of spectacle perpetuated by the media are brought to question. Scenes captured in photographs, drawings and paintings play into popular hip-hop imagery.
In a similar style to previous bodies of work (such as his Dying to be Men series of 2009), Chiurai’s constructed environments are enticing and seductive but explore very real casualties of African independence and democracy and the effects of globalisation on war. Chiurai’s nation asks, “If we could write our history and chart our futures as we please, who would we be?”
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.
