Kudzanai Chiurai is on of the artists in LagoPhoto, until November 25.
(all photos are from the ‘State of the Nation’ series, 2011)
About his ‘State of the Nation’ series:
LAGOS, Nigeria — When the Zimbabwean photographer and multimedia artist Kudzanai Chiurai decided to document the brief, turbulent history of a fictitious African country for his 2012 series “State of the Nation,” he turned to the past for inspiration.
“If you look from the 1960s, when a lot of African countries gained independence, there was a sense of hope and optimism and a new swagger that we were beginning to write our own destiny,” says the artist.
Within a decade, though, military coups, rigged elections and a string of broken promises turned that narrative on its head. Widespread disillusionment began to set in. “This image gradually changed from one that was celebratory to [seeing ourselves] in the newspapers and on television as these dysfunctional people,” says Chiurai.
That dominant image of strife and suffering, he says, still persists, in spite of the changing reality on the continent today. For Chiurai, those stereotypes only reinforce the need to “examine these things through different lenses.”
“We should constantly be interrogating those images … [and asking] how we can rewrite them,” he says.
Confronting those stereotypes has always been a driving force behind LagosPhoto, a monthlong celebration of photography that kicked off on Oct. 25, with the works of Chiurai and more than three dozen other artists on display in galleries and public spaces across the Nigerian metropolis.
(Christopher Vourlias, Aljazeera)
