Chiurai stages One Vote event and print exhibitionby Michael Smith
Johannesburg-based artist Kudzanai Chiurai held an event at swish, microscopic design boutique Dokter and Misses on June 27, with an exhibition following into early July.
At the store, Zimbabwean-born Chiurai staged a mock poll entitled One Vote, at which visitors were invited to 'cast your vote of no confidence in the Zimbabwe elections'. The event was followed by an exhibition of agit-prop prints, in which Chiurai's already direct style exploded into incendiary power. In a suitably populist fashion, the prints were extremely reasonably priced: I arrived with R200, left with a great print, and still had money for cappuccino on the way out.
The works on show, though uniform in format, ranged from a plaintiff, fugitive figure on white background and an acerbic image of weapons piled into a retail trolley subtitled 'Shopping for Democracy', to frenetic, Heartfield-inspired photomontages. The latter aptly recalls apartheid era graphics, as angry text jostles with close-cropped images of police brutality.
The title of this show referred to the grim situation in Zimbabwe, as on June 23 leader of Movement for Democratic Change Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of the Zimbabwe election run-off . Zimbabwean voters were left with one choice, Robert Mugabe.
