Jo'burg art pick: December 2 2011

Award-winning artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s current solo exhibition, State of the Nation, takes place at two venues: an old workshop on Gwi Gwi Mrwebi Street in Newtown and Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main.

The show features a large body of work—photographic prints, drawings, large oil paintings, video, sound installation and performance—that explores the African condition by juxtaposing the past and the present of a continent in the grip of civil wars. Mail & Guardian reviewer Percy Zvomuya wrote: “The rituals of power in old Africa’s statecraft are such that you don’t know whether a given scene is the aftermath of a war or the beginning of another.

So in that vague, subliminal space, Chiurai’s protagonists act out the pathologies of power using a bewitching melding of spectacle and ritual—both African and Christian.”

On December 3 at 12.30pm attend a panel discussion between Kudzanai Chiurai and academic Pitika Ntuli at 50 Gwi Gwi Mrwebi Street, Newtown. At Goodman Gallery Projects, Arts on Main, the show runs until January 2012.