Kunsthaus Bregenz

NAIROBI — A STATE OF MIND
Cooperation Goethe-Institut Nairobi, Kenya
26 October 2012 - 20 January 2013

Jacob Barua (Kenya), Sam Hopkins (Kenya|Great Britain), Laura Horelli (Finland|Germany), Peterson Kamwathi Waweru (Kenya), Maasai Mbili (Kenya), James Muriuki (Kenya), Kevo Stero (Kenya), Studio Propolis (Kenya|Great Britain)


Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, whose origin goes back to the 1899 colonial project of extending the railroad from the coast to Lake Victoria is one of East Africa’s most important economic hubs and seat of numerous international organizations. In recent decades it has also become the center of a dynamic art and cultural scene. Hand in hand with the local effects of globalization, the liberalization of the national communication media, the advent of the internet in the 1990s, and the end of Daniel arap Moi’s repressive regime in 2002, fundamental changes have also occurred in the field of art. Despite the ongoing paucity of state support, numerous independently organized initiatives and transnational collaborations have arisen, whose actors share a growing interest in challenging and critically questioning national narratives and sociopolitical developments. Against the backdrop of East Africa’s colonial past and power structures, some of which still exist today, the presented works in the KUB Arena develop their own views of their surroundings, their history and of the constant changes that make up contemporary Nairobi.

In his series Nairobi—A Utopia in the Eye of the Beholder (2007–2012), Jacob Barua works with the city’s architectural landscape, analyzing by means of photographic documentation the history inscribed in individual buildings. All in all, in its conglomeration of widely differing, often imported styles and techniques, the series draws attention to Nairobi as a projection screen—a tabula rasa of implemented fantasies, utopias, and life visions. Laura Horelli, by way of contrast, in her video work The Terrace (2011), returns to a residential complex where a number of her childhood years were spent. By means of photographs and video takes within a circumscribed area, she activates her memory of everyday family life, providing glimpses into the social structures of Kenyan society in the late 1970s and early 1980s. James Muriuki likewise employs the medium of photography, although in his case his gaze is turned on contemporary processes of change and movements in public space—buildings in process of construction that mark the current texture of the city as symbols of power, progress, and technology. Observations of their urban surroundings are the starting point for Peterson Kamwathi Waweru’s large-format charcoal drawings as well as the works of Sam Hopkins, Kevo Stero, and the artist group Maasai Mbili.

What they all share is reference to a society in which ideas and modes of life are imported and appropriated under the influence of historical and current social movements—the British colonial period and the later dominance of the development aid sector, Asiatic »migrant workers,« waves of refugees, and economically dictated rural depopulation. Rather than just trace this wealth of concepts and lines of influence, the artists are interested in extrapolating them into the present, encountering the city as a potential sphere of action, and dissecting out hidden structures in order to project their own pictures of a city–pictures that open up narratives that go way beyond postcard clichés, exoticizing external views, and national concepts of identity.

Naeem Biviji and Bethan Rayner of the Nairobi-based architecture and design office Studio Propolis developed an architecture for the occasion of the KUB Arena exhibition that gives spatial expression to the content of the project.