Starkest Africa

16 October 2011 - 04:16 By Sean O'Toole
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Untitled I (State of the Nation), 2011
Untitled I (State of the Nation), 2011

Kudzinai Chiurai conveys a disturbing vision of the continent in his new photo exhibition, writes Sean O'Toole

Exiled Zimbabwean artist Kudzinai Chiurai, who lives and works in Johannesburg, faces a double jeopardy whenever he visits London. With his shaven head, full beard and angular glasses, he has the look of a devout Muslim. At least this is how UK policemen have in the past interpreted his outward features.

"I have been stopped a couple of times and asked which religious group I am from," he recently told a small audience at the Goethe Institute. Upon producing his unpopular Zimbabwe passport, Chiurai, who is staging an ambitious two-part exhibition in downtown Johannesburg next month, has to deal with a further barrage of questions.

Where are you staying? Hyde Park. What are you doing in doing in London? Exhibiting. Both answers are true.

Chiurai, who trained as a painter at the University of Pretoria, has been exhibiting in London since 2003. In April this year he formed part of a group of 17 artists profiled on the survey exhibition Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

His contribution, The Black President, was a series of large, colour-drenched portraits of an imaginary African cabinet. Untypically, his politicians radiated youthful good looks and possessed an over-the-top fashion sense matched only by that of deposed Zairian autocrat Mobutu Sese Seko.

"I conceived of the series as representing a kind of a collective psyche of how we in Africa see our leaders," Chiurai is quoted in the lavish coffee-table book published to coincide with the exhibition.

"I think that Africans look at people in power or heads of state with a vivid imagination - there's a lot of projection; they become larger than life and we tend to look up to them."

A fair bit of this logic permeates his new series of photos, but more on these choreographed set pieces - or "theatrical portraits" to borrow from the artist's language - in a moment.

The inclusion of Chiurai's work in the London exhibition irked some visitors, who wanted to see more of the raw concern characterising our documentary tradition. For these unhappy folk, the styled beauty and urban cool of Chiurai's large-scale photos read like a betrayal of this country's stark social reality.

It is a rather facile view, partly because it overlooks the earnestness with which Chiurai regards his craft, himself, and his responsibility to the troubled country of his birth.

"You have to consider what is your social contribution," he said at the Goethe Institute. "What will history write about you in the years to come? What will you contribute?"

But Chiurai's apparently submerged critique wasn't the only reason frumpy traditionalists huffed about his inclusion. There was also the matter of him not being a photographer, not in the traditional camera-strapped-around-the-neck, eyes-scanning-the-street sense.

"It's like art direction, and mostly someone else takes the photographs," is how Chiurai describes what he does in the book about the London exhibition.

"I wrote the briefs for the series and started working with stylists and a photographer and borrowed clothes from people."

Two years on - The Black President series was shot in 2009 - he continues to work in exactly the same way.

"With that first series I was just having fun," offers Chiurai when I phone him to chat about his new State of the Nation photographs. "It was my first experience with photography. It was a one-day shoot that we planned a week before.

"With this new work I spent a lot more time considering what I am going to put in the work and what the narrative is going to be and the composition."

There are 10 photographs in the State of the Nation series. Collectively, they tell an imaginary story steeped in recent African history. The plot of this story blends despair with optimism.

"On a continent that has experienced more violent conflict than any other," states Chiurai in the official press release for his show, "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."

Photographed over two weekends at Chiurai's Jeppestown studio by Jurie Potgieter, his collaborator on the Black President series, the new work collages many different historical references, not all of them pleasant.

There is a striking photograph of a woman in military garb brandishing a decommissioned Kalashnikov rented for R200. Like all the young models, retail workers mostly under 26, she is play acting. Her self-confidence is nonetheless palpable. I read her to be equal parts Brenda Fassie and Tina Turner circa Mad Max.

"It is a reference to a communist poster," says Chiurai. "The original image had a Chinese guy with a huge flag behind him."

Working with this basic reference, Chiurai replaced the Far Eastern man with an African woman, her aggressive appearance meant to evoke a female soldier he saw in a documentary about the civil war in Liberia.

Where his Black President photos were largely inspired by the materialist confidence of hip-hop culture, Chiurai's new work mines a darker seam. As part of his research he watched documentaries about child soldiers and the wars in Liberia and Ivory Coast.

He also looked at Francesco de Goya's 1814 painting of the execution of Spanish loyalists in Madrid by Napoleonic infantrymen in 1808, and created a photo that replaces the row of murdered men with women.

"I wanted to make it relevant to African politics but at the same time have it more global," he says.

Photos aside, Chiurai's forthcoming exhibition, which kicks off with a party on November 3 in Newtown, will include drawings, large oil paintings, video, a sound installation and performances by Thandiswa Mazwai and Zaki Ibrahim. He will also be launching the third instalment of his irregular magazine, Line.

I ask Chiurai, who has effortlessly morphed into the role of gregarious producer, if he doesn't long for the disciplined solitude of painting. Not really, he replies. His artistic style is now adaptable. Meaning: if things can't be adequately expressed in his big Cecil B DeMille photographic shoots, he will revert to painting or drawing instead.

He offers all this in his typically subdued speaking manner, a voice at odds with the uncompromising brashness of his photographs. Here's the thing: Chiurai doesn't apologise for the modesty with which he speaks, or the self-confidence that underpins his art.

"I can't change who I am, I can't change what I want, or what I do," he said, standing alone on stage at the Goethe Institute. The battle to be himself, he was announcing, had been won.

  • Chiurai's State of the Nation is on at 50 Gwi Mrwebi Street, Newtown (November 3 to December 3) and Goodman Gallery Projects, 264 Fox Street, City & Suburban (November 6 to end January 2012).
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