Parading stuffed dictators with dark humour to disarm history
Frieze winner Kiluanji Kia Henda’s show In the Days of a Dark Safari pokes fun at desire to catalogue life in Africa
It is unexpected to find amusement dominating an exhibition that tackles views of Africa as either monstrous, or a Paradise Lost. But Frieze 2017 winner Kiluanji Kia Henda’s show In the Days of a Dark Safari disarms history by poking ample fun at any desire to catalogue and brand life on the continent. The Angolan-born artist says irony helps him to communicate and tell his stories. "If you want to find a space for your argument, you also have to get some humour in your voice," Kia Henda says. "Humour, irony is a way to destabilise things, like making people think, to provoke people rather than call them names." Among his photographs and film on show at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town is a peculiar tour through the Museum of Natural History in Luanda. In one series of prints, Kia Henda draped stuffed animals with black cloth, protecting them from any categorising gaze, and making them unknowable, mutable, mythic objects. In a second series, The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda...
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