Violence in two very different forms is explored through art this week.
? Award-winning artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s new solo exhibition, State of the Nation, will take place at two venues: a warehouse on Gwigwi Mrwebi Street in Newtown and at Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main. Between the two venues the show features photographic prints, drawings, large oil paintings, video, sound installations and performance in a body of work that explores the African condition by juxtaposing the past and the present of a continent in the grip of violent civil wars.
50 Gwigwi Mrwebi Street, Newtown. Exhibition here opens on November 3 at 6.30pm and runs until December 3. At Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main it opens on November 6 at noon and runs until January.
? A Means to an End, Patricia Driscoll’s atmospheric photographs of abattoir interiors, are thankfully devoid of animals in distress. But the cleaned, almost sterile spaces hint at the horrors of the meat production process and say much about the way this reality has been concealed from public scrutiny. “The abattoir is a space of ordered containment, organisation and repetition, yet at the same time it is a site of trauma. But in the space and time of the abattoir as a workplace it is just another day, another shift. In my photographs I investigate these contrasts and the strange and otherworldly environment.”
Driscoll’s large-scale images show intricate machinery and blood-stained surfaces and everything has a strangely out-of-date appeal.
Gallery Momo, 7th Avenue, Parktown North, until November 14. Tel: 011 327 3247.