Venice 2024
Kudzanai Chiurai | Venice 2024
Kudzanai Chiurai
Head-Image
Chiurai’s single-channel film 'We live in silence' offers an introspective journey into colonialism at the dawn of independence. The artist disrupts what he calls ‘colonial futures’ by creating ‘counter-memories’ within his imagery to contest dominant colonial narratives.
INSIGHTS Episode 01 with Tarini Malik as she discusses the work of Kudzanai Chiurai
In 'We Live in Silence (Chapters 1-7)', Chiurai dissects the film through similitude, recreating scenes intercut with visual references from popular culture and art historical sources to stage alternative colonial histories and futures that reject this notion that African migrants are to think, speak and understand language like their colonisers.
The film takes Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo’s critically acclaimed 1967 drama Soleil Ô as its starting point, responding, in particular, to the colonial mindset encapsulated in the following line from the film:
‘It’s crucial to be able to select individuals capable of speaking as we do, capable of thinking as we do, capable of retaining, of absorbing, yes absorbing words as we do and above all giving them the same meaning, and so there’ll soon be millions of white-washed blacks, white-washed and economically enslaved’.
The series repositions the female role in recent struggle histories – recasting the lead character as a woman in the black liberation narrative to challenge the gender bias inherent to such narratives, which tend to position the black male as the victim of colonisation and, hence, the liberator of the post-colony.
We Live in Silence I, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence II, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence III, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence IV, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence V, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence VI, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence VII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence VIII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence IX, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence X, 2017
Pigment ink on Fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XIII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XIV, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 150 x 193.5 cm (59.1 x 76.2 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XV, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XVI, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 90 x 255.55 cm (35.4 x 100.6 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XVII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
We Live in Silence XVIII, 2017
Pigment ink on fibre paper
Work: 193.5 x 150 cm (76.2 x 59.1 in.)
Edition of 10
What more can one ask for?, 2017
Theodolite, security fence and red earth
200 x 200 x 200 cm (78.7 x 78.7 x 78.7 in.)
Unique
Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Zimbabwe)
Chiurai has held numerous solo exhibitions since 2003 and has participated in various local and international exhibitions, such as Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (2011) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now (2011) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Other notable exhibitions include The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited curated by Simon Njami at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2014) and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah USA (2015), as well as Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier (2017) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Regarding the Ease of Others (2017) at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Genesis [Je n’isi isi]- We Live in Silence at IFA in Stuttgart, Germany and Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream (2020) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
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 in 2013. Chiurai has held numerous solo exhibitions with Goodman Gallery and has edited four publications with contributions by leading African creatives.
At present the artist lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.