Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai has always had an interest in the cyclical nature of struggle, liberation, and freedom – it is this fascination that is brought to light in Madness and Civilisation, an exhibition that borrows its title from Michel Foucault’s seminal text, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. For Chiurai, the ideas contained within this work relate to a central concern regarding whether the colonial project of ‘cultural disarmament’ was so effective that Africa will never be able to imagine a future that has not been pre-determined by its colonial past. In exploring these ideas, 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.

 

 

‘What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?’— Michel Foucault, ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’

 

In November 2017,  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.

The entry point into Madness and Civilization is a new series of mixed-media drawings. 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.

 

 

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.

Madness and Civilisation will open on Thursday, April 12th, 6pm at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. 


Kudzanai Chiurai was born in Harare in 1981, where he currently lives and works. His work was the focus of two major solo surveys in 2017 including We Need New Names at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare; and Regarding the Ease of Others at Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town. Other solo exhibitions have taken place at MoCADA, New York (2015); RISD Museum, Rhode Island (2015); Kulungwana Gallery, Maputo (2015); and Brixton Art Gallery, London (2003). 

His film Iyeza was included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and was awarded a Jury Special Mention at the Melbourne International Film Festival that same year. He was awarded the FNB Artist of the Year award in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Future Generation Art Prize.

 

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