Land Claims Confessional
Kudzanai Chiurai
Land Claims Confessional, 2017
Sound installation, wood, fabric, neon and wallpaper
Work: 220 x 221 x 128 cm
Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice employs a revisionist strategy to disrupt what he refers to as ‘colonial futures’, embedding alternative memories into history that remedy the omissions inherent to the colonial project. In Land Claims Confessional, Chiurai points to how processes of reparation are inherently contradicted by their execution. Comprising the Catholic confessional booth and sound excerpts from Land Claims Court proceedings in South Africa, the work alludes to the role of religion in colonialism as well as the complex interplay of 'guilt' and 'absolution' within discussions of dispossession and redistribution of land and other resources. It also suggests that structural mechanisms of inequality are existent even after their apparent dismantling.
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