Bubblegum Club

Tag: Kenyan artist

  • Artist Wanja Kimani’s interrogations of private and public power

    Artist Wanja Kimani’s interrogations of private and public power

    Kenyan-born artist Wanja Kimani has a visual practice that strings together stories and visual histories which comment on the idea of home, displacement, trauma, memories and imaginations.

    While imposing elements of her own life in public spaces, she occupies the positions of both narrator and character. This is evident in the various media she uses to construct her work, including installation, performances, text, film, textiles and sound.

    One of her recent works Expectations, a collaboration with Annabel McCourt, is a performance that was presented at Dak’Art 2018 – Biennale of Contemporary African Art. It was performed in response to Annabel McCourt’s Electric Fence. The work dives into the complexities surrounding borders, immigration, race, as well as private and public power, and how these forms of power are constructed. These larger themes are interwoven with explorations of mortality as well as personal and physical boundaries.

    In the video of the performance online, the first few seconds create the impression of eyes opening after a long sleep, with shots of lights hanging from the ceiling and wire fencing coming in and out of focus. The voice of the narrator recalls memories from a childhood, presumably the childhood of the character (played by Kimani) that appears on screen. As the narrator goes on to explain how walls will come separate the children mentioned in the recollection of memories, the viewer sees Kimani maneuvering between wire fences and throwing rocks and bricks on top of each other, as if intending to build a wall or to examine what remains of the structure these bricks once constituted.

    The poetic narration speaks of silencing, leaving home, crossing borders, and the traumas that accompany this. The interaction between the words and what the viewer sees create a heaviness, the relevance of which becomes apparent as the story of Charles Wootton is told. The narrator shares how Wootton has died as a result of a racially motivated crime in Liverpool in 1919. He was thrown into the water at Kings Dock, and as he swam, trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted by bricks until he sank. Kimani writes his name on a blackboard during the performance. She then goes on to write down the names of many other victims of hate crimes. In this way the victims are mourned and celebrated at the same time.

  • Jacque Njeri on her ‘MaaSci’ series

    Artist and designer Jacque Njeri has always had a close relationship with art, which she expressed through various mediums growing up. She took this experimentation with art as a child and channeled it into formal training when she completed her degree in Bachelors of Art in Design.

    The aim of Jacque’s work is to look at everyday scenarios but through a whole new perspective. “It is almost as if to answer the hypothetical question, ‘If not this, then what else?’” she explains.

    In contrast to her previous Stamp Series, Jacque’s latest digital series titled MaaSci, a portmanteau of Maasai and Sci-Fi, sees Maasai people walking on the moon and traveling through space on UFOs, as well as sitting on or walking towards celestial objects on earthly terrains. Her strategic use of layering and taking into account the sitting and standing positions of the Maasai people she portrays in her images, allow the final images to come across as photographs rather than digital constructions. Jacque explains that the role of the Maasai people in this series “was to provide that rich cultural aesthetic to the different science fiction themes represented in the compositions.” Her images also speak back to the documentary-style photographs coupled with narratives that highlight African cultures and their traditions as occupying a kind of anachronistic place in the present. Instead the Maasai are seen to be inhabitants of both the past, present and future, playing with linear chronological thinking, and highlighting Maasai cyclical time.

    Artists from the continent are often categorized as Afrofuturists. Thinking about the almost immediate categorization, I asked Jacque what she thinks about this. She replied by saying, ‘I love it! It sets an African future apart from other futures. It alludes to a future for us and by us. It shows ownership of a voice in matters pertaining Africa…sort of.  I have been an Afrofuturism enthusiast even way before I started contributing to that genre.”

    Jacque has a number of projects that she is working on at the moment, but is planning on extending her MaaSci series given the positive reception that is has received.