Syowia Kyambi: A solo and A group show, in Nairobi and London
Syowia Kyambi, our Co-Director of Masters Studies, currently has her own solo show in Nairobi AND is soon taking part in an upcoming group exhibit in London.
SOLO SHOW: KASPALE AT THE NAIROBI CONTEMPORARY ART INSTITUTE
WHEN: 23th March - 30th June
WHERE: NCAI Rosslyn Riviera Mall, Kenya
WHAT: Kaspale is a trickster character created by Kyambi to intervene in situations where the burden of often violent histories has rendered them difficult to articulate and engage with. This body of work, which began in 2018 with research into the history of the Amani Research Station in Usambara, Tanzania and the archives of the MARKK Museum, has expanded into a series of encounters and interventions in which Kaspale shuttles back and forth in time and space, appearing in real and imagined spaces, always with a mind to speak and act where speech and action are otherwise curtailed.
Image courtesy of the artist
The exhibition brings the audience into Kaspale’s ever-growing universe to witness as Kaspale intervenes in recent Kenyan history, appearing in photographic archives of East Africa’s colonial past, and entering the spaces which bear the legacy of the colonial project. Beyond this, Kyambi introduces Kaspale’s kin, and transports viewers to Kaspale’s place of origin. Kaspale’s multiform, multidimensional nature is an invitation to question ideas about time, memory, origins, and kinship.
More information about the exhibition: HERE
Event poster
GROUP SHOW : MATTER AS ACTOR AT THE LISSON GALLERY IN LONDON
WHEN: 3rd May – 24th June
WHERE: 27 Bell Street & 67 Lisson Street, London
WHAT: This group exhibition brings together works by artists who present mutable forms of matter – whether embodied in clay, rock, pigment, plastic, metal or organic substances – as active agents in the complex entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world. Moving beyond the idea of nature as raw material abundantly available for humans to use, this exhibition acknowledges the distinct properties, agencies and histories of materials, taking heed of their dynamic role in sustaining dense, interwoven relations.
Exhibition poster
Featuring the work of the following artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Dana Awartani, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, D Harding, Irmel Kamp, Syowia Kyambi, Richard Long, Otobong Nkanga, Yelena Popova, Lucy Raven, Zhan Wang and Feifei Zhou.
“Artists, across eras and geographies have intuitively or consciously given form to material inter-relationships in a unique way. The artwork is never a given and never an end point, but an emergence, a moment of becoming, a contingent confluence of the multiple histories of matter.”
– Greg Hilty, Lisson Gallery Partner and curator of ‘Matter as Actor’
More information about the event: HERE
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Syowia Kyambi is an interdisciplinary artist and curator whose media spans across photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture and performance installation. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). Syowia is based in Nairobi and of Kenyan/German origin. Kyambi is the co-founder and curatorial creator of Untethered Magic, a collective founded in 2019 that focuses on facilitating exchange and building networks in support of research and process-based practices. Kyambi is particularly interested in knowledge building through the merger of different disciplines, often bringing together different age groups, areas of study as well as merging artists with creatives in the field of humanities and sciences. In addition to her artistic work, Syowia is a mentor and the co-director of the MFA studies at Transart Institute.
PRAXIS STATEMENT
The connection between the psyche, history and the entanglement that exists within non-stagnant identities is ever present in my creative process. I am always pushing beyond simple categorisation looking for acknowledgement and healing. As the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says, “…resistance means opposite to being invaded, occupied, assaulted and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance here is to seek true healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly…where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.”
My work is messy, complex and uneasy and asks the viewer to bear witness to the hidden histories embodied in my work. The embodiment of collective experiences, and constant search for links between the now and the morphed now. I reveal the complex framework of prejudices that are based on Western romanticising of my context, East Africa and simultaneously explore the richness of my artistic self-reflexivity and ability to transform performatively.
More about the artist: HERE
Performance Between Us, image curtesy of the artist