Captivating deals in the cruel light of history
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Loading... - Kirsty Duke
- 21 Mar 2023
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"Flight" at Malmö Art Gallery presents works by Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo and Eric Magassa, who tackle colonial history in different ways. Dan Jönsson gets a lump in his stomach from desolate murmurs and eerie retinues.
Group exhibition
"Flight"
Malmö Art Gallery. Shown until April 9
It is very rarely that artistic archival projects move me. On the contrary, the accumulation of similar objects and documents usually recalls the effect of inverted binoculars, a kind of distanced vertigo that makes one see what it is now – a war, an urban environment, a dormant subculture – in the frozen light of history.
But the Zimbabwean Kudzanai Chiurai's "Library of things we forgot to remember" at Malmö art gallery is something else.
Over a hundred brightly colored old LP envelopes from the black resistance and liberation struggle in the 1900s are crowded on the walls and screens. Sun Ra and Dollar Brand, chimurenga and highlife, ANC and Frelimo solidarity records, recorded speeches by Baldwin and Senghor. In one corner hang enlarged reproductions of an African "liberation calendar" from 1974, with days of significance commemorating important dates in the anti-colonial struggle.
And as the empty heart in the middle of it all: the reconstruction of the illegal radio station "Radio Freedom", which was run by the ANC during the South African anti-apartheid era. Read More…
