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Kudzanai Chiurai Madness & Civilization

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Kudzanai Chiurai Madness & Civilization KUDZANAI CHIURAI MADNESS & CIVILIZATION CURATED BY CANDICE ALLISON 12 APRIL – 12 MAY 2018 GOODMAN GALLERY CAPE TOWN Kudzanai Chiurai, Madness & Civilization III, 2017 (detail) CAPE TOWN GALLERY HOURS TUESDAY–FRIDAY: 09H30–17H30 SATURDAY: 10H00–16H00 3RD FLOOR FAIRWEATHER HOUSE 176 SIR LOWRY RD, WOODSTOCK P. +27 (0)21 462 7573/4 F. +27 (0)21 462 7579 cpt@goodman–gallery.com www.goodman–gallery.com In November 2017, Kudzanai Chiurai’s first solo exhibition in his home Kudzanai Chiurai was born in Harare in 1981, where he currently lives and country, We Need New Names, went on view at the National Gallery of works. His work was the focus of two major solo surveys in 2017 including Zimbabwe. Its timing was prescient. While the country’s longstanding We Need New Names at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare; and former President Robert Mugabe was being ousted through a military-led Regarding the Ease of Others at Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town. Other solo coup, Chiurai was exhibiting his politically-driven work, which combines exhibitions have taken place at MoCADA, New York (2015); RISD Museum, art historical imagery with references from popular culture and archival Rhode Island (2015); Kulungwana Gallery, Maputo (2015); and Brixton material to explore the visual language and tropes that help construct Art Gallery, London (2003). Notable group exhibitions include In Their myths, history, and ultimately power. Own Form at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2018); Ex Africa presented by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Belo Horizonte in Under the continued curation of Candice Allison, Madness and Civilization Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília (2017-18); Africa. Telling a World at re-stages this exhibition alongside new works and research that highlights Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2017); Being There at Fondation Chiurai’s creative projects over the past two years. It takes its title from Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Michel Foucault’s seminal 1964 text Madness and Civilization: A History Hell Revisited at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014) and SCAD of Insanity in the Age of Reason. In so doing, the exhibition maintains Museum of Art, Savannah (2015); dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012); Chiurai’s practice of revisiting and rejecting ‘colonial futures’, which fuel Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art the notion that Africans should think, speak, and act like their colonizers. in New York (2011); and Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2011). The entry point into Madness and Civilization is a new series of mixed- His film Iyeza was included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the media drawings. Fashioned in the likeness of screen printed propaganda Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and was awarded a Jury Special Mention critical of white supremacy in 1970’s Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, the drawings are at the Melbourne International Film Festival that same year. He was collaged with found letters, photographs, and images torn from The Kaffirs awarded the FNB Artist of the Year award in 2012 and shortlisted for the Illustrated, a reprinted folio of watercolour paintings originally produced 2014 Future Generation Art Prize. 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 Join in the conversation on Goodman Gallery’s Instagram: @goodman_ co-founder Bobby Seale. gallery | Twitter: @Goodman_Gallery | Facebook: Goodman Gallery.
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