Kudzanai Chiurai uses film, photography, painting, print making, installation, and sonic interventions to explore postindependence sociopolitical concerns. B-Diamond is a recurring figure in Chiurai’s practice who epitomises a corrupt politician. Often adorned in lush leopard-print coats, mayoral chains, and regalia, B-Diamond has inherited colonially rooted tools of injustice from previous regimes. The dark foliage surrounding her references Neoclassicism and its associations with the gentry. The layers of collaged texture, paint, and text point to complex colonial entanglements that mar present-day postliberation politics. The gold text overlaying her face include inscriptions derived from ledgers of enslaved people found in Cape Town, South Africa. Such paintings are often part of installations that include sculptural and archival elements such as What More Can One Ask For? (2017). Collectively, elements such as the barbed-wire fence, colonial map, and land-surveying instrument highlight histories of extraction and displacement. They cause us to question who or what is being protected, and from whom.
This is the first time the work of Kudzanai Chiurai is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Tandazani Dhlakama
