Kudzanai Chiurai's new art exhibit reimagines the black experience

There's a scene in Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo's seminal 1970 film Soleil Ô in which a character says: ''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 whitewashed blacks, whitewashed and economically enslaved."

That piece of dialogue has stuck in the mind of Zimbabwe-born artist Kudzanai Chiurai, who saw Soleil Ô three years ago.

He has now focused on the implications of that sentiment and its relevance for many of the decolonisation debates on the continent almost 50 years later as the starting point for a dual-location show that opens at the Goodman Gallery and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg over the next few weeks.

Conceived of as the culmination of a trio of shows which began with the artist's Revelations (2011) and Genesis (2016), We Live in Silence, the multimedia response to Hondo's provocations, is Chiurai's attempt to both reflect on the development of debates around the fate of Africans post-colony and address some of the omissions in Hondo's original text.

In particular, something that caught his attention was "that there weren't any black women in the story, and that was glaring in terms of women's contribution to the struggles of the first post-colony generation".

In order to counteract that, Chiurai "essentially changed the narrative so that the central character of the film is a woman and she plays every role herself and her voice becomes the main voice".

Chiurai studied in Pretoria and then had to endure a period of exile in South Africa - thanks to his less than flattering early works that were heavily critical of the Mugabe regime. He has since returned to Zimbabwe where he now lives.

Over the course of the last decade he has created a unique visual style that combines popular culture with biting satirical critiques of the continent's post-colonial leadership and political agendas.

It's a style that's seen him exhibit around the world and his works are displayed on the walls of luminaries like Elton John and Richard Branson, but it's also a style that's fed back into new western interpretations of the situation of black life in America and Europe.

It is a cultural exchange that he views as "interesting [in] that we're all kind of essentially experiencing the same thing. The conversation about decolonising the university is the same that's happening in Brazil but there it's happening in Portuguese. So, I think there's a zeitgeist taking place."

An early retrospective of his work will also feature at the opening of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town next month, an honour Chiurai takes in his stride, viewing the establishment of the gallery as the beginning of a conversation where "what we should be considering is not the museum within our lifetime alone, but the museum beyond that and what the Zeitz will be in 100 years' time".

"I view it from that perspective and I think that its purpose and function will change considerably over time."

• 'We Live in Silence' starts on Thursday at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. 

• This article was originally published in The Times.