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Shortly after his debut at the renowned Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Kudzanai Chiurai is already participating in this summer’s documenta. His work looks tribal and extremely African, but is also close to Western viewers. While writing this essay, the South-African art world and indeed, society as a whole, have been stirred up by a painting by Brett Murray, exhibited in the Cape Town branch of the Goodman Gallery. Not only because of the painting itself, a portrait of the president and ANC leader Jacob Zuma in a pose famous from Leninist propaganda posters, showing a dick between his legs, hinting at his notorious polygamy, promiscuity and paternalism. More discomforting was the threat of state censorship, which required the gallery to remove the painting from Murray’s exhibition Hail the Thief II. After the painting was defaced twice by visitors and their filmed actions were posted on YouTube, it was removed indeed. Naturally, the issue also raised the usual black-and-white controversy, unavoidable in a country that faced blunt racism and Apartheid politics for so long. But this is 2012. The work is not so much directed against state politics but rather against the current state of the nation’s leadership, as the ANC faces internal struggles which are redirected into repressive national politics. The presidency thus brings old-style African dictators such as Mobutu and Mugabe to mind rather than the representative of the most prosperous country of the whole continent.Like Murray, Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981) is affiliated with the Goodman Gallery, but he represents another generation in South Africa: the post-Apartheid generation that has seen an enormous, and formerly impossible, influx of Africans into the country – a situation that marks Johannesburg today as a multicultural, cosmopolitan metropolis. Originally from Zimbabwe, Chiurai became an exemplary protagonist of this new Johannesburg. But rather than addressing the politics of the day in his own country, Chiurai got more interested in the governmental pitfalls that seem part and parcel of what signifies, and stigmatizes, Africa as an idea. With South Africa taking the economic lead of the sub-Saharan region, welcomed or not, Chiurai is the artist to indulge in this relatively new hangout of the formerly internationally boycotted republic.His breakthrough exhibition, last winter at the Goodman Gallery’s Johannesburg branch, was suggestively entitled The State of the Nation. The African leadership is an important motive in his work, but unlike Murray, Chiurai does not address one particular leader (although the negative stereotype boasted by the notorious Mugabe is always latent). Chiurai’s address counts for any nation, without being explicitly critical. Instead, he explores the qualities of a multidisciplinary practice, which lends the work its ambiguity. In an extensive series of portrait photographs, Chiurai and others pose as the president or a minister of an imaginary nation – yet sooner referencing someone between, say, Mobutu and Snoop Dog than the expected three-pieced civil servant. In its over-exaggeration, the series plays with stereotypes indeed, but these stereotypes stem from globalized fashion photography and (black) sub-cultural identity, not related to Africa specifically, even though the work inevitably also brings the luminous dressing-up and role-playing of Samuel Fosso to mind. In a more recent series of ten photographic works (Untitled, 2011), this bashing of identification and stereotyping follows another itinerary. The series suggests a history of perpetual violence, freedom fighting, revolutions, etcetera. But in a completely overdone mode, we are confronted with tableaus inspired by documentary footage, Mao propaganda banners, the Last Supper, Goya’s El tres de mayo – all mediated through what seems the rambling set of a splatter or Nollywood movie. Whatever the history of violence, it is intensely shaped, magnified, manipulated and eventually corrupted by popular imagery.Media are supposed to offer a window to the world, but the media industry has created a reality of its own – a reality often taken as the real thing. Art exhibitions are also media. They tend to single out an artist’s nationality as an important frame of reference, and hence we might find satisfaction with typecasting Chiurai’s work as ‘African’, addressing an African reality. As if the ‘abstract’ in abstract art ever said anything about its quality. Such an issue is definitely played out by Chiurai. Another example clarifies his position once more. In a series of three photographs (Untitled), we see the interior of an office space playing the lead role in what obviously is a brief narrative of the working day of a civil servant. The furniture is obsolete; so is that early 90s computer monitor. In the second photograph we see the same interior, but the focus has shifted to the desk, which is now covered under piles of bank notes, a calculator and fast food. In the final photo the money has gone and so has the business briefcase that was there in the previous picture – the only thing left on the desk is an old-fashioned whiskey decanter, two half-emptied glasses, a full ashtray and a discarded briefs on the leather sofa next to it. The clock in the background indicates a nine-hour working day. What to think of this? We can take it as a critical portrait of an average fraudulent ministry’s office, presumably somewhere in Africa, the furniture a leftover from late colonialism when trade was ‘fair’ and the economy prosperous. But the sheer didacticism of the scheme is much more akin to a 70s B-detective. And that furniture, isn’t that vintage? Like Cindy Sherman’s most important lesson on identity formation, we see what we have become used to from visual culture. For Chiurai, this is as much true for the identity of a nation or a whole continent. Chiurai’s most ambitious project to date is the video he is presenting at dOCUMENTA (13). Called Iyeza (2011-2012), it is perhaps best described as an inverted video clip. Unlike the clip, or indeed his own photography (or paintings, as he is also an avid painter), the goal here was not to put as many visual stimuli in a brief span of time, but to stretch the visual information contained in a scene of eight seconds, shot with a high speed HD camera, to a film of eleven minutes. The basis is a Last Supper setting with people behind and in front of the table: some are involved in an argument, others are separated from the world around them, someone is actually shot to death in the elongated split second. In the foreground, a sangoma, or medicine man, and his burning candle capture the attention of two superstitious women. The accompanying singing of the South African Thandiswa, based on a composition of hers after which the film is named, captures the ear of the beholder. In fact there’s a lot happening in these eight seconds. Again, Chiurai draws us to an age-old iconography, reminding us that when it comes to images, we are not really separated from the late Middle Ages. Geographic distance is not the issue; it is our conception of time that makes us think we are ahead, while we are in fact wasting our time. In the ten-minute span of the film, we become aware that this is not Africa – this is us.Jelle Bouwhuis is curator of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam