Eastern Voices: Contemporary Artists from East Africa: Addis Fine Art, London
Souad Abdelrasoul (Egyptian, b. 1974)
Lives and works in Cairo
Souad Abdelrassoul’s artistic practice spans various media; drawing, painting, sculpture and graphic design. Working between the abstract and figurative, she intertwines human and animal figures, believing we are all intrinsically connected to the earth. Her metamorphosed figures repel the typical standards of what society perceives as beautiful, instead she focuses on the connections between the human race and the natural elements of life; earth, animals and plants. Tree-like figures with branching veins and arteries and giant insect-like creatures merge on her canvases to remind the viewer of the vital bond between our internal lives and the exterior world we live in. Abdelrassoul graduated with a BFA in 1998 from El Minya University and completed her master’s degree in History of Art in 2005. In 2012 she completed her PhD in Modern Art History. Using her vast knowledge and academia, Souad explores the idea of the modern woman, exalting in the feminine and the emotional. Adopting a surrealist touch her paintings are symbolic of her own personal experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Many of her motif’s address these issues, whilst also making reference to famous artists and practices that she admires. As a mother herself, she draws attention to how women are forced to evolve and adapt in an oppressive environment. Often using familiar myths and legends, she paints stories through her figures which question the role women have in society and cultural history in a disruptive and thought-provoking way. By reconceptualizing the way we perceive space, she re-purposes notions of form, science and nature into something strikingly personal.
Since 1998 she has exhibited frequently in group and solo exhibitions in Cairo as well as shows in Nairobi, Beirut and the USA. She has also exhibited at international art fairs in London and Marrakech. In 2022, Souad Abdelrassoul's The Magician (2021), was acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. She is one of the artists included in the forthcoming publication 300 Women Artists (Phaidon, 2022).Abdlrassoul graduated with a BFA in 1998, completed her master’s degree in History of Art in 2005, and in 2012 she completed her PhD in Modern Art History. Since 1998 she has exhibited frequently in group and solo exhibitions in Cairo as well as shows in Nairobi, Beirut and the USA. She has also exhibited at international art fairs in London, Dubai and Marrakech. In 2022 she was presented in a show in London called A Never Ending Longing at Cromwell Place, as well as at The Armory Show in New York. She has been collected by the Chazan Museum in USA and the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusettes, USA. She also also been included in the new Phaidon '300 Great Women Painters' publication. Her work was also featured on a banner outside the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London at the end of 2022.
Gor Soudan, (Kenyan b. 1983)
Lives and works in Nairobi
Gor Soudan is a conceptual artist living and working in Kisumu and Nairobi. His practice incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation and ceremony to reflect on social relationships and interactions with the immediate environment, and how these relations transform both physical landscapes and inner-scapes of individual imagination and collective beliefs.
During his early career, he created installation sculptures in response to the 2007 civil conflicts in Kenya. Called ‘The Fire Next Time’, human torso forms woven from the charred wire from street protests reflected on the socio-political dynamics of human agency. His practice has evolved with a continued psycho-spatial exploration of mark making, inhabitation and cohabitation, more recently taking on an interactive and social approach. After research into Kenyan urban and Ethiopian traditional coffee networks, and material experimentation with coffee, he created a wandering coffee ceremony which was a platform for conversations about our relationships to land, food production, rural and urban cultures.
Since 2019, Soudan has been largely based in rural western Kenya where he is co-founding a communal art space embedded in a market garden and tree nursery, which will act as a centre for art within an agroforestry project. His current research is focused on the forms and materiality of handmade agricultural interventions in rural and urban landscapes, considering how such interventions affect our relationship with the environment and how nurturing plants reflects not only development of our imagination but also our overall communal development. As part of this research, he has been worked with a collective of basket weavers, studying traditional weaving forms and incorporating new media.
These ongoing ink drawings are part of a woven sculptures and installation project, initiated in late 2019 entitled,The Observatory. The drawings began as small landscape studies and developed into large conceptual drawings, which analyse patterns, art/craft forms and icons found in my natural and sometimes virtual environment; architecture, arts, crafts and symbols. In these places which I have dwelled in or travelled to (Kisumu, Nairobi, Lamu, Lagos, Tokyo, Yokohama, Sierra Leone, Kampala, Lagos etc.) I am relying on my first hand experiential exploration of these places, and analysing my internal mental landscape in an attempt to make sense of my space and time. Some of these patterns and symbols, e.g. Lamu door patterns, Ethiopian traditional crosses, emojis, signs and even particular hues of colours are superimposed within natural flora and fauna forms studied during an ongoing community art studio embedded within an agro-forestry project. This particular work attempts to provoke a sense of our micro and macro awareness of the present condition of the our world, the sense of working in a rural market garden environment, whilst also being part of a global artistic community. Moreover the drawing also alludes to ideas that our conception of the ‘glocal’ (local and global) environment as being the foundation of our internal concept of language, spirituality and science.
Soudan studied Sociology and Philosophy at Egerton University, Kenya and has had multiple solo exhibitions as well as group shows in Kenya, Sierra Leone, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, including Kikulacho: Remains, waste and metonymy |||, Japanese Cultural Centre, Nairobi in 2018, Tokyo A La Carte, Tomio Kayama Gallery, Tokyo Japan, and Dust Sheet Embroided Snow, Project Gallery Arundel, United Kingdom and Gor Soudan, A Retrospective, Redhill Gallery, Limuru, Kenya in 2018. In 2014 he participated in Backers Residency, AIT in Tokyo Japan, and in 2017 he participated in the ICAF residency in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2022 Soudan was featured at 1-54 contemporary art fair with Circle Art Gallery in London to great success.
Tahir Karmali (Kenyan b. 1987)
Lives and works in New York
Karmali is primarily an investigator of materials and vernacular design. Living and working in New York he focuses on the underlying source of the material as currency, as markers of cultural identity or as an exploitable artefact. Transforming these materials into varying formats (sculptural installations, prints, textile works) that are deceptively beautiful and attractive, as an art form and allowing the viewer to savour them as primary material before a layer of trauma (of migration, of displacement, of labour) slowly reveals itself. Tahir’s work is based not only on his personal experiences of migration and immigration but also how certain elemental materials simultaneously transit through diverse cultures and are thus transformed, according to their use in each space, especially in the art world.
Combining digital photography and portraiture with paper making, Karmali deals directly with the material to craft concepts around the process and manipulate how the portrait is presented. Using this method to discuss nationality, authenticity, documentation and borders for migrant populations in Africa, his work echo's his own Indian-Kenyan heritage and his colonial migrant narratives. Using silk fibres as a way to represent the body, his work seeks to express the effects of the violence inflicted on us. In the various constructions in the gallery, Karmali creates tension between steel sheets, silk fabrics and metal bolts piercing the fabric. As silk is naturally a weightless fibre, though very strong, the contrast of the delicateness of the silk draws attention to the aggressiveness of the metal.
Lawrence 'Shabu' Mwangi (Kenyan b. 1985)
Lives and works in Nairobi
Shabu has been a practicing artist since 2003. His practice focuses on the effects of structural and historical violence, and different forms of marginalization on the individual and collective psyche. Shabu’s paintings are considerations of societal and cultural fissures. His most recent work traces an ongoing personal journey of striving to understand the balance between the two things that drive us, love and pain, and how we react in different ways depending on which of the two is dominant. Shabu’s work has previously dealt with questions of collective suffering, and the effects that inequality, marginalization, and other forms of structural violence have on communities. In this new body of work, he has turned his gaze inwards, focusing on an examination of the self. He asks himself questions about how he sees the people around him and his interactions with them.
Mwangi has participated in workshops and residency programs both locally and internationally. His work has mmost recently featured in Systems of Emptiness, a prelude to Documenta15, a group show with Wajukuu and The Sources of Our Seas, a solo show at Circle Art Gallery in 2021; East African Encounters, a Circle Art Gallery group exhibition at Cromwell Place in London in 2021, and Self Adressed, an exhibition of self-portraiture by artists from Africa and its diaspora curated by Kehinde Wiley for Deitch Projects LA. Other shows include: The Man with Two Shadows (2020), an online exhibition with Circle Art Gallery; Yawning for Power, 2019, a solo exhibition with Tilleard Projects; The Stateless, solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery (2018); Freedom, Flight, Refuge, Circle Art Gallery 2017; Art Transposition Nairobi-Kampala-Hamburg, LKB Gallery, Hamburg; Pop-Up Africa, GAFRA, London (2017); Out of the Slum (2012), Essen, Germany; He has also participated in residencies in Kenya, Germany, and Italy. In 2022, Mwangi and fellow members of the Wajukuu Art Project participated in Documenta fifteen in Kassel, where they went on to with the Arnold Bode prize. Shabu participated in the 13a Biennial do Mercosul in Brazil in 2022.
Donald Wasswa (Ugandan b. 1984)
Lives and works in Uganda
Wasswa’s work encourages conversations about the future of mankind looking at the influence of science and technology in modern societies. He studies the process of transformation with his primary focus on humans versus a given environment, social interactions and the nature of communication involved. Wasswa uses actual events to influence his research which rely on spontaneous encounters with natural or found objects. These objects are carriers of memories of places that he claims as art materials. The objects later suffer various forms of interference by carving, assembling and arranging, which result into Sculptures, 3D paintings, at times installations. Wasswa imagines the secret lives of man-made objects and how they determine the future humans.
A multidisciplinary artist, Wasswa studied Sculpture at Kyambogo University. His practice has evolved to encompass sculpture, painting and performance. He was the 2016 recipient of the Merit Award in the Absa L’Atelier competition. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Uganda and abroad, including: Zikunta, Kampala, 2016; To Live is to Become, Afriart Gallery, Kampala, 2017; Degenerative Evolution of the Living, Absa Art Gallery, Johannesburg in 2018. In 2019, Wasswa was one of the selected artists for Ouagadougou Sculpture Biennial and showed at 1-54 and a group exhibition with Circle at Cromwell Place in 2021. In 2022 he returned to 1-54 contemporary art fair in London and was featured at Untitled, Miami art fair with Steve Turner Gallery. He is currently based in Kampala where he is the founder/proprietor of Artpunch Studio. He is currently working towards a solo show at Circle Art gallery's new location in 2023.
Boniface Maina (Kenyan, b. 1987)
Lives and works in Nanyuki
Working predominantly in painting and drawing, Boniface Maina explores the inconsistencies and conflicts of human interaction within physical space.The distorted, often exaggerated figures that populate his compositions are intricately drawn with interwoven lines, taking on a muscular appearance. Seeming to embody the anatomical study of human form, these figures mirror the particularities of everyday existence, inviting the viewer to reflect on their own physical and social interactions and contortions.
Maina attempts to reconcile traditional art-making techniques with contemporary concerns, resulting in tensions and experimentation in his approach. Paint and ink are layered on various substrates, symbolising foundational aspects upon which individuals expose or personalise themselves. The backgrounds in his compositions serve as supportive highlights, drawing the viewer’s eye; sometimes deepening, and sometimes limiting, their perspective. Through such moves, Maina seeks to initiate dialogues that question societal constructs and conditions.
Maina earned his diploma in Art and Design from the YMCA National Training Institute, Nairobi, in 2008. In 2013 he co-founded Brush Tu artists’ collective, a communal studio space. Solo exhibitions include: Waiting, Watching and Wishing, Circle Art Gallery, 2020; Transitions, Nairobi Gallery, 2017; and Line of Inquiry, The Art Space, Nairobi, 2016. Group exhibitions include: Eastern Voices, Addis Fine Art, London, 2023; After Images, ReLe Gallery, Lagos, 2023; Africa 1:1, Ca’Pesaro, Venice, 2023; Walking the Edge, Afriart Gallery, Kampala, 2022; African Identities, AKKA Project Gallery, Venice, 2022; East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021; Young Guns, Circle Art Gallery, 2017. He has exhibited at international art fairs including: Art Dubai, 2022; WopArt Fair, Switzerland, 2022; Cape Town Art Fair, 2021; and AKAA, Paris, 2017. Residencies include Africa 1:1 Lab Residency in Venice, 2023.
