Past Exhibitions

Coming from a successful year, Shabu Mwangi feels he has more to fight for than celebrate. His work has travelled from the Mukuru community in Lunga-Lunga, Kenya to Germany and Brazil but Shabu is ready to deal with the uncomfortable here. Back in his studio, in painting after painting he gives voice to social injustices, by looking at pain, stolen identities and lack of freedom. Shabu’s work while rooted in the global is often deeply personal. Winter Memories is a collection of innerscapes in which winter acts as a metaphor for our collective memories and how they shape our worlds.

He has grown and evolved, and it is more clear to him what he stands for in his path as an artist, he understands his voice, he knows his place and he knows what to do. He believes that artists have a responsibility to empower others who are not in a position to use their voices. “I paint for people to be triggered and to spark a conversation, I paint to liberate, I am not painting for beauty, I am painting to start.”

“We are facing as [a continent] policies from colonized times, this is a modern way of slavery.” Through artworks like The Surrogates or Motion in Misinformation, Shabu questions the system and injustice from the colonial era. “We are no longer a community. The Maasai no longer have access to their lands… I don’t think it’s time to talk about happiness, there are still colonial elements in my country. Structures that are designed to keep people in torture.” State of Agony expresses this collective pain.

In Freedom in Illusion, Shabu questions our freedom. “We live in a fake society where our identity has been stolen. There is no freedom without a real identity.” He calls for keeping our voice alive, fighting for our traditions, values, culture and challenging ourselves about society.

Earlier this year, at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Shabu felt his frustrations went beyond his country. In different interviews while there, the questions he was asked were only about his community and constrained him from talking about global perspectives which he felt dismissed his voice. “We speak with the knowledge (of global affairs) but they don’t listen to us. Don’t put me in a cage I can speak from other places”. Supreme Cages is an expression of that angst.

The painting Winter Memories gives us an insight into how memories are subjective to our own experiences. There are good and bad recollections in every memory, winter can be good for some or terrible for others depending on the location. This could refer to the coming winter and the power struggles we are seeing in Europe or Ukraine. 

The artwork Flags that Bleed addresses how flags come from wars and blood, and even now flags bleed as fighting perpetuates across the globe.

“Why do people move?” He asks rhetorically, talking about migration. “Because we are humans, we are not limited by one place; when a country is being exploited, people will need to look for a better place. The problem is also capitalism, the eurocentric mentality, these are big problems, if we want to be a community we should embrace diversity, rather than have one central way of being and acting, but no one is doing it.”

In this exhibition, consistent with his vision, Shabu stands for a change. A change in policies that undermine freedom. In the institutions of society, Shabu sees the cages that are binding the progression, the evolution, of man. And he wants to shake it. He is not concentrating on the post-colonial struggles but on the contemporary fights that the next generation is facing. As a leader in his community and organisation, Shabu is expressing his concerns in the best way he knows, with his brush. 

“Mirrors of Existence” features a series of raw, unsettling portraits by Mostafa Sleem. They don’t have gender, they don’t have age, they don’t have race… They are universal beings, they are mirrors in which everyone can see themselves.

Peaceful veils, crying veils, happy veils, tired veils, still veils, pleasant veils, scared veils, indecisive veils, absorbed veils… not faces, just veils…

Using detailed black-and-white female figures painted in oil and charcoal characterizes Lincoln’s work. Focusing his interest in the action of the daily life narratives, he covers the faces of his characters to imbue them just with feelings and emotions.

Suddenly and for a flash, this empty space in Williamsburg, New York will be filled by strange faces. 

As soon as you enter the room you will be surrounded, observed, intimidated, surprised by many silent figures… From where they come from? Who are they? But first of all who is responsible for all these Faces? Who is Eltayeb Dawelbait?

Eltayeb Dawelbait (Sudan, 1968), is an artist, an activist, an archivist of sorts. He emigrated to Kenya, with many other artists in the late 90s after a tumultuous decade of actively protesting against Bashir Regime while at the University of Sudan. Dawelbait finds inspiration in the past, the histories, the lives, and the tender stories that hold weight hence the use of old materials, once owned and used by others. In these works, you will find the heavy-handed marks, carving away the portraits seen with pursed, muted lips, and often no eyes. Although not explicitly admitted, this may speak of a past of repression where he has lived and still fights for today.

The faces have different shapes and colors. Colors which lived already in the found objects. Colors that come different times and eras. He finds discarded wood, windows, doors, kitchen drawers, sheets of rustic metal… Like an archaeologist looking for lost treasure…. Digging deep, scraping layer after layer… Shades of blues, greens, oranges, bringing to life the hidden and forgotten individuals and memories.

“An empty canvas is full” – Robert Rauschenberg

“The Sky Inside You” is a pair show between Eltayeb Dawelbait (Sudan) and Mostafa Sleem (Egypt), two artists who connect and draw inspiration from childhood memories of The Sahara Desert. Memories make us who we are.

The Desert: A place where dunes move and landmarks vanish. A landscape as fluid as water where distance loses meaning, time stretches to blurring horizons and the solidity of our vision turns to mirage. Chaotic. Wild. Continually changing. Never the same. The desert; where history buries itself and dreams are lost beneath the sands of time.

The Sky: Speckled with stars. Each one makes its nightly pilgrimage above the vast tides. Beacons in transit. Lights to guide us. And the moon, a witness. Incandescent with beauty. Eclipsing all else, even the furious burning of distant. The Arabs naturally looked to the order of the heavens to navigate the chaos of the dunes.

Eltayeb Dawelbait, the Night on the Desert

He remembers his father mysteriously navigating the desert with his eyes on the stars and the moon, a memory that tethers his imagination to the celestial spheres and still draws his eyes upwards. When reason is eclipsed, intuition ignites and a space for creativity opens. We follow the fleeting footprints of our ancestors with our gaze cast upwards to the moon for inspiration and guidance. For Eltayeb, the genderless moon is unreachable, standing in the heavens as an impossible dream. An embodiment of beauty with its wan, lunatic light and the mysterious power of its transit. The moon pulls at our souls as it reaches for the tides. In the desert we may lose ourselves but when the moon is shining we find our way home. The desert winds blow colours through time to Eltayeb’s waiting palette. Using discarded wood, windows, doors, kitchen drawers, sheets of rustic metal, he scrapes layer by layer as if searching for lost treasure, digging up buried lives and bringing forgotten creatures to light. In the sand, when ghostly memories stir, they evaporate into the sky to be resurrected by the artist as moons that remind us that life is a fragile moment and beauty is eternal.

Mostafa Sleem, the Mirage

He remembers a father surrounded by the devotional Sufi music, a spiritual practice that embraces harmony and rhythm as portals to the holy depths of the soul and facilitates a connection to the everything in all. When Mostafa looks to music he sees beauty and eternity. When I am in silence I fall into that place where everything is music. Rumi The face of a Mostafa painting is a tessellating mirage, an illusion of character caught between reality and dreams, torn between the rigour of stillness and the melody of time. Music cannot cease to move without ceasing to be. So too the soul. And art. Throughout his childhood Mostafa saw how his father would look to the desert to cleanse the bright waters of his soul, give chase to his deepening spirit and meet with the love that connects us all as one. In solitude his father would venture into the sands, led at first by the stars above and then by the guiding lights that ignite when we feed our inner spaces with the music of silence. We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking.

“Behind this Face“ is an exhibition about the weight of the imagery we all absorb and how even over centuries, whether deliberately or unconsciously it is reflected in each artist’s visual vocabulary.

We invite you to wander through the history of art, using the evolution of portrait in painting as a guideline, exploring the relationships between the Masters from different art movements and a selection of works by contemporary artists from Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, DRC, and Egypt. 

Submerging us through time… From ancient Egypt, passing through the Renaissance, the revolution of the Avant Gardes to the recent movement of Conceptual Art.

The artworks of the show are compared chronologically with acclaimed works from the history of art. These works and those of the past share common aspects that make more evident how art is affected by time, culture, society and genuineness. 

Call it a face, a profile, a visage… it doesn ́t matter… at the end, it is not just a human face that is reflected in the portrait, the self-portrait and the collective portrait; it is the mirror of existentiality.

We are connecting African contemporary artists to the Masters of different times as we believe that the language of art is universal and consciously (or unconsciously)  connected between all eras. All the analogies are observations from the curatorial research and selected in a way to broadly trace the chronological evolution of art from its origins to the present. Although there were many other relationships and interpretations that we could have explored, we decided to focus on the main aspects and thoughts that drove the artist to evolve from one movement to another.

There are many aspects analyzed in the selected portraits, like the traces of time, the anatomy, the psyche, the cultural references, the philosophical milestones, the space, the materiality of the work and the intention.

The painting of a human face is a painting of their identity, because it constitutes cultural weight. It is found in all people, eras and cultures. Art is a consequence of socialization and acculturation of the human.

The self-portrait comes from the inside out. It is a dive into the interior, in a way uncovers the hardest intimacy.

The human face has been an interpreter of one’s feelings, longings and dreams.

A selection of prominent artists practicing in Kenya. Some who have been working since the country´s fight for independence, others who were born in the 80´s and 90´s, all reflect the nation´s growing, changing, widening, courageous, striking group of thinkers and makers from different backgrounds.

Inaguration of Sport, Resources and education Centre. An exhibition of 16 artists, curated and organized by Verónica Paradinas Duro, Founder and Director of GravitArt Gallery and Hiroko Ishikawa, Exhibitions Manager of Wangechi Mutu Studio.

A frozen Smokey is analyzing the situation, he is trying to understand it. He was away for more than 2 years, between 2017 and 2019. During that time, Paul only painted the backgrounds. He thought that Smokey needed to leave the paintings to better understand his background. But when Smokey came back in 2020 he found a mess of a background. Smokey, in a frozen state, doesn’t know how to react. But he has one certainty, as Paul also does. The certainty that he had been there before… A sense of Déjà Vu.

So, who is this mysterious figure that wanders around in Onditi´s paintings? Who is Smokey? Why is he always alone? Smokey is the representation of the human mind. He is trapped in his own mind. The mind and the thinking process only have space for one person, so only Smokey can be there. Inside his mind, all that he sees is his thinking.

There is a reason I did not paint Smokey for that long, I was doing his background _Paul Onditi

Déjà Vu is a statement about a phase of humility; sometimes we feel lost and all seems unknown. These drawbacks remind Paul of his first days in his career as an artist. This exhibition is a state of mind-like a Déjà vu, it feels like it has already happened. Onditi even drops his prices just for this exhibition to be radically consistent with his statement. Surrounded by dystopian worlds and reflecting Smokeys – after all his experiences and his successful career as an artist, he still has more questions than answers. What to do with this new background? How to understand the mystery of the universal mind?

For Paul, the backgrounds are also characters full of emotions and moods. They can be sunny, cloudy… They have issues such as climate change and the impact of pollution on the earth. They are consequences of the decisions and actions of the collective identity that are deeply disconnected from its origins and its true nature. Reds represent the fire; the luminous colors speak about radiation. The backgrounds change locations because Smokey travels around, and elements go out of track because things are going out of tradition. Nothing works like before; the climate, the religion, the social, the politics… all is out of balance and now also Covid fills the backgrounds creating more confusion and uncertainty. The envelopes framing the paintings are a metaphor for isolation. The letters are there to be seen but not read because all are still mysterious and inexplicable, and so is humankind.

In the mind of humankind, we live in a subjective world. If it is correct in your mind, it doesn’t matter if it is correct in the mind of others. That is why in Onditi´s paintings, 0+1+5 = 015. The answer is not scientifically correct; the artist creates his own math, his own answers. We are all unique and unique minds have unique answers.

Every narrative has a conflict. Every artwork has a narrative. Conflict is a major literary element. Through this exhibition, different artists with specific art pieces will convey the types of conflicts which are codified as “Man against Man” Eltayeb Dawelbait and Onyis Martin, “Man against Nature” Paul Onditi,  Souad Abdel Rasoul and Peter Elungat, “Man against Self” Tesfaye Bekele, Kevin Oduor, “Man against Society” Rashid Diab and Shabu Mwangi, and “Man against Machine” Dennis Muraguri and Lemek Tompoika.

Man against Man

Who are The Spirits of Faces of Eltayeb? What are their names? Where do they come from? Tricky questions. When Eltayeb Dawelbait gets inspired by a face, when someone captivates his mind, he runs to his studio to express it. But in the process, his strong inner self interferes and affects the results. It becomes complicated to separate the new face from the portrait of the person to himself. Becoming himself, becoming her or him, or no one, or a new one, or an unknown one or all of them…

In Theory of space, Onyis Martin looks at the interpretation of the viewer. There are several bodies, but you may identify them as the same individual walking in different times or as multiple individuals living at the same time. They look the same because they are sharing an emotion, could be a concern, a thought, a joy… Where you locate your stance, “if against” or “in favour” is dictated by your state of mind.

The film Mr. Nobody starts with a young boy standing on a station platform. The train is about to leave. Should he go with his mother or stay with his father? An infinity of possibilities rise from this decision. As long as he doesn’t choose, anything is possible. Following each choice to its conclusion, he lives all the possible lives. Becoming three different people; the three at the same time or none.

Before his death, Mr. Nobody tells the journalist that neither of them exists. They are figments in the mind of the 9 year old boy at the train station.

Eltayeb, Onyis and Mr. Nobody are giving to the viewer the power to decide.  When there is an open choice there is an infinity of multiple states of being.

Man against Nature

Concerned with the global problem of climate change, Paul Onditi attempts to address this with Smokey. Smokey, the body that often appeared in the paintings of Paul navigates in a vacuum. He is in between time, place, phases and positions. This vacuum is the artists’ ideal place for questioning, research, exploration and manifestation of ideas. This isolated, anonymous figure that anchors the compositions, floats in these works over abstract backgrounds that include patches of fierce hues, highlighting global issues that connect us all: pollution, climate change, natural unrest and loss of resources.

The work of Souad Abdel Rasoul and Peter Elungat represents the relationship between the physical nature of human beings and their psychological and metaphysical state of being, in connection with a certain body or natural shape. Souad thinks nature is part of every human and, in turn, both nature and man influence one another. It is the foliage in man, the animal in man and also the mineral in man. Elungat in “Mushrooms, Red and Me” merge nature, the red as his state of mind and himself creating a kind of metamorphosis becoming all one soul.

Man against Self

“My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly.”

― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tesfaye Bekele and Kevin Odour‘s work deal with the internal struggle of ‘self’ and existence in the physical space given the vessels in which we experience the physical space. Both very personal in subject matter and also execution and technique.

Bekele explores between the biological body we are given and the physical space to search and experiment what this physical human body is. In his Bodyless series, a complete body series where he explores the notions of a whole or complete body, he wonders, ‘Can one body be incomplete but complete another that is also incomplete?’

The limits of our physical body does not limit the inner worlds and the intimate relationship with the art and our freedom to express. As with Bekele’s works, the artworks of Kevin Oduor are intimately linked to his personal experience with his own body and movement or lack thereof. Kevin questions existence through representing parts of the body which evoke the absence of other parts or even the body itself. Does this body actually exist? He questions himself looking to his artworks. He goes even further, as he wonders if the physical presence of a body or a specific part of it is even necessary, pointing out that if that evocation of a body brings to mind a person, does it automatically have an existence?

Man against Society

How the body is located in physical space brings us to the works of Rashid Diab. Paintings of women in vast, open, even ominous landscapes with no real hint of their direction. Rashid reflects on the specific roles of women in Sudan and speaks of their status as society has constructed for them. Mystery abounds, he leaves much for the viewer to question and wonder not just in the case of Sudan but women’s roles across the globe.

In other societal conflicts, we have Lawrence ‘Shabu’ Mwangi. Derived from his personal experiences he depicts the differences and injustices between people in actual society. He portrays immigrants as the monsters the media describe them as, to highlight the lies that society accepts turning a blind eye. Through his honesty, his use of a particular and personal palette of colors and specific iconography he paints the reality of this world with its many unresolved conflicts.

 Man against machine

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” George Orwell, 1984

The sculptures of Dennis Muraguri look like industrial machines but they follow the anatomy of the human body. Slender yet intelligent structures of metal that support themselves like the bones in our bodies do. The analogy of body organs working like machines; the pumping of the heart or the bowels working like pipelines. The comparison and confrontation of the human behaving like a machine make us think of the imagined futuristic purgatory that George Orwell portrayed in his book “1984”. Cold and hard like robots but the works still have natural organic shapes which may be fighting for the real inner self, the humanity, the instincts, the divinity…

The same theme appears in the work of Lemek Tompoika.. Bodies coming up to a head that is just a black box. This box represents the things imposed by society that often enough is not questioned. Religion, traditions and culture are already established and decided for us. Many people, like robots with a lack of consciousness accept these principles as a matter of fact as if the debate on the matter is not even an option.