Kudzanai Chiurai's photographic series, 'We Live in Silence', addresses the residue of colonialism by highlighting Black women's most valiant and apparent attributes as liberation leaders and freedom fighters, each one challenging the gender and race bias that is often present in historical narratives.
The beating heart of the series is its bold surrealist imagery, which helps Chiurai acutely confront dominant colonial histories and suddenly recast its most vulnerable protagonist as futuristic deities, ascending upward, boldly standing flanked by ancestral entities, donned in brightly colored regalia and perched upon a throne. The dream-like imagery demands that viewers rethink the stories they have been told and escape colonialism's restrictive boundaries. Focusing on the contemporary African experience, Chiurai tackles timely issues, including xenophobia, government corruption, and displacement - themes looped in a seemingly unending cycle worldwide. Although illusionary, 'We Live in Silence' is simultaneously conceptual and representational.
Challenging static notions of authenticity and tradition, Chiurai expertly layers an anthropological etching of a "caffre woman," which is positioned in the background of each photo. The impression of a woman from Cafferia (presently the Eastern Cape of South Africa), bare-breasted, clad in jewelry, a shawl, and a loin cloth, and holding a child, was initially illustrated in “Voyage de M. Le Vaillant dans l'Intérieur de l'Afrique par Le Cap de Bonne Espérance, dans Les années" [1] by French explorer, ornithologist, and writer François Le Vaillant. Here, Chiurai's juxtaposition of contemporary and historic images requires that present-day subjects confront their intimate associations with the past.
