Did the artist Kudzanai Chiurai foresee the fall of Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe?

If ever there was a timely exhibition, Kudzanai Chiurai’s We Need New Names at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe is it. The Zimbabwean artist’s first solo exhibition in his home country went on view just as the country’s former President Robert Mugabe was forced to resign in a army-led handover. Long-recognised for his politically driven video, photography and installations, Chiurai combines art historical references and chic pictorial illusions to present searing works that serve as allegories of power, justice, and freedom—and the lack thereof. Chiurai explains that in order to create his most recent works, he mined the museum’s archives to find aesthetic patterns for the ways in which colonialism institutionalised the process of “disarming people”. He explains: “you disarm someone culturally and you give them a new purpose, a new psychology, a new identity and these things start being internalized… we are only now starting to deal with some of those things.”