Invocations: A Group Exhibition: Circle Art Gallery

Souad Abdelrasoul (Egyptian, b. 1974)
Lives and works in Cairo

Souad Abdelrasoul’s practice spans various media, incorporating drawing, painting, sculpture and graphic design. Working between the abstract and figurative, she intertwines human, animal and vegetal forms, believing we are all intrinsically connected to the earth. 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.

Adopting a surrealist touch, Abdelrasoul’s paintings exalt in the feminine and the emotional. They explore the idea of the modern woman, informed by her own experiences of living within a patriarchal society. Many of her motifs address these issues, whilst also making reference to artists and practices that she admires. Reflecting on her experiences as a mother, Abdelrasoul draws attention to the ways women evolve and adapt in oppressive environments. Often using familiar myths and legends, she paints stories through her figures that question the roles women hold in society and cultural history in disruptive and thought-provoking ways. By reconceptualizing perceptions of space, she repurposes notions of form, science and nature into strikingly personal configurations.

Abdelrasoul graduated with a BFA in 1998 from El Minya University and in 2005 completed her master’s degree in History of Art. 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 in Nairobi, Beirut and the USA. Her recent exhibitions include: A Never Ending Longing, Cromwell Place, London, 2022; Behind the River, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2021; East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021. She has exhibited at international art fairs in London, Dubai, Marrakech and at The Armory Show in New York. In 2022 her painting The Magician (2021) was acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. She is also represented in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusettes, USA. Abdelrasoul features in 300 Great Women Painters published in 2022 by Phaidon Press. In 2022 her work was displayed on a banner outside the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London.

Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser (Kenyan, b. 1995)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser uses drawing as a means to engage with the world around him through a varied approach that includes observational sketching, plant pressing, digital image collection and writing. This multifarious interaction with his environment strives towards a more internal and intuitive “knowing”: one born less of experience and learning, and more of dreaming.

Fraser’s energetic and enigmatic drawings seek to complicate meaning and create new relationships between objects and ideas. Disparate elements in the drawing field are allowed to take up similar qualities in space, eschewing their typical contexts. The drawing field itself is broken down so that a conventional approach to looking and understanding is revised. Fraser invites the viewer to consider the transformations brought by shifts in the conditions of encounter or presentation. This process of de-contextualization is aided by the repetition of certain motifs and objects within and across compositions, extending them through space and time. This reiteration and multiplication emphasizes the contingent nature of meaning and its dependency on spatial and temporal relations.

Fraser studied Fine Art at Kenyatta University. In 2021 his solo exhibition There Is A Time and A Placewas held at Circle Art Gallery. He has shown in numerous group exhibitions in Nairobi including: Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022; I Will See What I Want to See, Circle Art Gallery, 2019; If Not Now, Cave Bureau, 2018; Line: The Basic Element, One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, 2018; Stranger Times, Circle Art Gallery, 2017; Anatomy of Me, The Art Space, 2017.

Tahir Karmali (Kenyan b. 1987)
Lives and works in New York
Tahir Karmali is primarily an investigator of materials and vernacular design. Living and working in New York, he reflects on the underlying sources of material as currency, marker of cultural identity, or exploitable artefact. By transforming materials into deceptively beautiful art forms (sculptural installations, prints, textile works), Karmali allows the viewer to savour their primary materiality before a layer of trauma (of migration, displacement, labour) slowly reveals itself. Informed by personal experiences of migration and immigration, Karmali’s work explores how certain materials transition through diverse cultures and are thus transformed, according to their use in space, especially in the art world.

Karmali has combined digital photography and portraiture with papermaking, allowing him to deal directly with material and craft concepts around process and the abstraction of presentation to discuss nationality, authenticity, documentation and borders. Elsewhere, he uses silk fibres as a way to represent the body, seeking to express the effects of inflicted violence. In various constructions, tension is created between the delicacy of silk with the aggression of steel sheets and metal bolts.

Karmali received a MA in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2015. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Water Scarcity: Perpetual Thirst, Wave Hill, New York, 2022; Bound Between Cliffs, a solo show at Circle Art Gallery, 2022; Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022; Heimaten, Museum für Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2021; Omniscient: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, 2021; Second Careers, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2020; Paper Boarders, IPCNY, New York, 2019. Karmali was commissioned to create work following the inaugural Open Call for The Shed Museum in New York in 2019. Recent residencies include Montelo, Nevada, 2020 and the Watermill Centre, New York State, 2021. In 2022 he exhibited at The Armory Show in New York and 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in London. Karmali’s work Swallowing Soil (The Scream 2)has been selected to be displayed at The Rockefeller Foundation's headquarters in New York, following his participation at The Armory Show in 2022.

Syowia Kyambi (Kenyan b. 1979)
Lives and works between Nairobi and Nuremberg

Syowia Kyambi recognizes the power of entwining the personal with the political and the entangled nature of both. Incorporating photography, video, drawing, sculpture and performance installation. Kyambi’s approach takes aim at the politics of the time as well as its legacy today, what is remembered, what is archived, and how we see the world anew. Kyambi engages with museums and/or ethnographic collections, personal and public archives. She bridges disciplines, visually  interrogates our histories, the representation of identity, the effects on the psyche and the nuances inour relationships to each other and the world we live in.

She was represented in the Pavilion of Kenya, La Biennale di Venezia this year in 2022. Her works include Infinity: Flashes of the Past, a permanent commission for the Nairobi National Museum (2007). She is the recipient of the Centre for Art Design & Social Research fellowship (2018-2020), the UniArtsHelsinki fellowship (2018), the Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship (2017) and the Art in GlobalHealth grant from the Wellcome Trust Fund, United Kingdom (2013). Artist residencies include PRAKSIS, Norway (2019), Delfina Foundation, UK (2016) and IASPIS, Sweden (2013). Her work is held in a number of collections including the Kouvola Art Museum, Finland, and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation.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. Her practice examines how our contemporary human experience is influenced by histories framed through the lens of the oppressing powers. She creates installations that incorporate performance to activate objects and narrate stories, exploring cultural identities, linking them to issues of loss, memory, race, and gender. She opens her gullet like a pelican and tries to digest the intangible. Rooted in her practice is a deep connection to land, earth and home.
Website: syowiakyambi.com

Theresa Musoke (Ugandan b. 1944)
Lives and works in Kampala

Theresa Musoke is a formally experimental semi-abstract painter who has been celebrated for her expressive portrayals of wildlife. Using a range of mediums and techniques to develop her imagery, Musoke allows the suggestive nature of dyed canvas to guide her painting into evocative forms of animals and landscapes. Over her career she has developed a distinctive visual language blending astute, sensitive draughtsmanship with painterly experimentation.

Musoke was the first female artist to obtain a degree from the Margaret Trowell School of Fine Arts at Makerere University in 1963. She went on to win the painting prize in 1965 and obtained a scholarship to study for a postgraduate diploma in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1965.

She later won a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue her studies at the University of Pennsylvania. On her return to Kampala, Musoke taught at Makerere University before relocating to Nairobi in 1976.

Musoke has been a highly influential figure in Kenyan and Ugandan art, not only for her celebrated visual practice but also as a distinguished educator. She lived in Kenya for over twenty years, teaching at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University. Throughout this time, Musoke exhibited frequently in local galleries such as Paa Ya Paa, Gallery Watatu and the African Heritage House. Her selected solo and group exhibitions include a solo show at the Uganda Museum, 1965; Sanaa: Contemporary Art from East Africa, Commonwealth Institute, London, 1984; Pioneer Women of the Arts, Nairobi Gallery, 2018; A Retrospective of Three Artists: Theresa Musoke, Tabatha wa Thuku, Yony Waite, Circle Art Gallery, 2022. Her work featured in the travelling group show Mwili akili Na Roho, at the Royal Academy, London and Haus Der Kunst, Munich.

Shabu Mwangi (Kenyan b. 1985)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Shabu Mwangi‘s practice focuses on the effects of structural and historical violence and forms of marginalization on individual and collective psyches. Living and working in Mukuru, an informal settlement in Nairobi where he established the Wajukuu Art Project in 2013, Mwangi’s mixed media compositions are powerful expressions of societal and cultural fissures. His most recent work traces an ongoing personal journey of striving to understand the everchanging balance between the driving forces of love and pain. Here, Mwangi has turned his gaze inwards, asking himself questions about how he sees the people around him and reflecting on his interactions with them.

In 2022 Mwangi and fellow members of the Wajukuu Art Project participated in Documenta 15 in Kassel, where they went on to win the Arnold Bode prize. Mwangi participated in the 13a Biennial do Mercosul in Brazil, 2022. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Self Addressed, curated by Kehinde Wiley for Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; Systems to Emptiness, a prelude to Documenta 15, 2022; A Never Ending Longing, Circle Art Gallery, Cromwell Place, London, 2022; The Sources of Our Seas, Circle Art Gallery, 2021; East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021. Other shows include: The Man with Two Shadows, Circle Art Gallery online, 2020; Yawning for Power, Tilleard Projects, 2019; The Stateless, 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, Essen, 2012. Mwangi has participated in residency programs in Kenya, Germany and Italy.

Dickens Otieno (Kenyan, b. 1979)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Dickens Otieno’s tapestries use and draw attention to the potential beauty in objects that would otherwise be dismissed as useless, and discarded. Aluminium cans are shredded and woven into sculptural fabrics in a process informed by the weaving of natural materials such as papyrus, raffia or palm that he observed growing up. Otieno’s mother was a tailor and he spent many hours in her workshop amongst lesos and kitenges, whose colours and patterns have since influenced his aesthetic. This engagement with textile grows from an interest in the way pattern, colour and iconography are used to imbue functional objects with meaning and identity. Otieno draws on his immediate physical surroundings, particularly the urban environment in his native Nairobi, to create his compositions. Objects piled high in markets, the constantly shifting skyline, and the pockets of nature within the concrete and steel haze of the city, have become sources of inspiration for his richly hued, increasingly sculptural forms.

Otieno has had solo exhibitions in Kenya and the USA: Most recently in 2024, Trails at Circle Art Gallery,Mtaani, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, 2021 and Mabati Tailor, Circle Art Gallery, 2020. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions locally and internationally including: East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021; See Here, Old Neals Auction House, Nottingham, 2018; Africa/Africa, Total Arts Courtyard Gallery, Al Quoz, Dubai, 2018; Young Guns, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2017; The Third Dimension, Circle Art Gallery, 2016; UNI-FORM MULTI-FORM, Roots Contemporary, Nairobi, 2016; Paint and Metal, National Museum of Nairobi, 2016. Otieno has exhibited at international art fairs including Art Dubai, Eye of the Collector, London, Circle Art Gallery, 2023 and Untitled Art Fair, Miami, Steve Turner Gallery, 2022. Residencies include the Tilleard Artist Residency in Lamu and a fellowship in Italy at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Sujay Shah (Kenyan, b. 1991)

Lives and works in Nairobi

Sujay Shah’s practice reflects on intermingled cultural ideologies, myths and histories, and questions how we can cope with the colonial pasts that are built into our surroundings. In his recent paintings, Shah deconstructs, satirises and critiques some of the harmful legacies of colonialism through the lens of big game trophy hunting. The presence of certain objects in Kenyan homes, country clubs and Safari lodges, such as skin rugs and mounted animal heads, serve as haunting reminders of this violent history. In his fictitious dioramas and still lives, acts of brutality go side by side with luxury items, such as Victorian objects, silverware and candelabras, challenging notions of what it means to be "civilised”. Intertwining horror, humour and surrealism, the exasperated animals are subjected to various states of disrespect, further undermining and trivialising the convoluted nature of these hunts. By referring to aspects of museum display, different moments are merged into a single image, analogous to how the perception and romance of Africa has been fabricated, exoticized and stereotyped: images which still perpetuate and haunt us today.

Shah graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2013. After college he lived in New York, working as a studio assistant for artists Paul Bloodgood and Anne Chu. Shah has exhibited in the US – in Savannah, Georgia and New York – and in France. His work is featured in the permanent collection of the Savannah College of Art and Design. In Kenya, his group exhibitions include Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022; Various Small Fires, Circle Art Gallery, 2021; I Will See What I Want To See, Circle Art Gallery, 2019; If Not Now, the Cave Bureau, 2018. In 2022 he was awarded a Venice travel fellowship by Wangechi Mutu Studio.

Gor Soudan, (Kenyan, b. 1983)
Lives and works in Kisumu/Nairobi

Gor Soudan’s practice incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and ceremony to reflect on social and environmental interrelationships. Working in series, Soudan considers how these relations transform both physical landscapes and imaginative inner-scapes. In his early career, Soudan created installation sculptures in response to the 2007 civil conflicts in Kenya. Human torsos woven from the charred wire from street protests reflected on the socio-political dynamics of human agency. Over time, his practice has evolved with a continued psycho-spatial exploration of markmaking, inhabitation and cohabitation.

Since 2019 Soudan has been based in rural western Kenya where his research has centred around the forms and materiality of handmade agricultural interventions into the landscape. Working with a collective of basket weavers and studying traditional weaving forms have informed a series of ink drawings, in which Soudan entwines patterns found in natural, virtual and architectural environments.

Soudan studied Sociology and Philosophy at Egerton University, Kenya. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Dust Sheet Embroided Snow, Project Gallery, Arundel, UK, 2019; Kikulacho: Remains, waste and metonymy III, British Institute of East Africa, Nairobi, 2018; Tokyo A La Carte, Tomio Kayama Gallery, Tokyo, 2018; Imprints, Redhill Gallery, Limuru, 2016; Join the Dots, Circle Art Gallery, 2015. In 2014 he participated in the Backers Residency, AIT in Tokyo Japan, and in 2017 the ICAF residency in Lagos, Nigeria. Soudan’s work has featured in international art fairs including 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in London, 2022 and Cape Town Art Fair, 2018, both with Circle Art Gallery.

Tiemar Tegene (Ethiopian, b. 1985)
Lives and works in Addis Ababa

Tiemar Tegene’s works are anchored in her training as a printmaker, expanding etching processes into monoprinting through spontaneous experiments, most often using household items and their textures. Rather than producing numbered editions struck from the same plate, each work falls outside of fixed description as Tegene finds new ways to press the texture of an image through the application of ink onto the page. Additions of coloured pencil forge repeating icons and patterns, becoming increasingly abstracted whilst adding layers of personal narratives.

Channelling an intimate and complex response to the world around her, Tegene’s compositions are transmutations of her emotional experiences and the nature of her relationships with others. Inside these images live the details and echoes of larger stories, whether relayed in confidence by a friend, overheard on the street, or drawn from song lyrics or film. Consolidating ‘real’ details with flourishes of reference and imagination, her portraiture reaches for specific and consuming emotional moments, that ripple through the body and space.

Tegene received a BFA in Printmaking from the Allé School of Fine Arts & Design in Addis Ababa. Her work has been exhibited in Ethiopia at the National Museum of Ethiopia, Alliance Ethio-Francaise and at the Gebre Kristos Desta Centre, and internationally, at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and James Fuentes Gallery, New York, well as a series of public murals commissioned in the city of Addis Ababa. She has featured in the group exhibitions Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022 and Addis Contemporary II, Circle Art Gallery, 2021.

Tabitha Wa Thuku (Kenya, b. 1963)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Born in the year of Independence, Tabitha Wa Thuku began her creative practice as a young, self-taught artist and one of the only female artists of her generation. With a career approaching three decades, Wa Thuku has developed a painterly language unencumbered by convention, her works distinguished by a brooding palette which ranges from subtle browns to rich reds.

Wa Thuku originally studied Textiles and Clothing Technology at Kenya Polytechnic, then from 1996 to 1999 she attended the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts. She has undertaken various workshops and residencies to develop a wide range of techniques, demonstrated in her extensive body of work. In addition to her own artistic production, she has also worked as an art educator, teaching and mentoring children and young artists. Wa Thuku has exhibited regularly throughout her career in Kenya and abroad, including in The Netherlands, Italy, Hong Kong and Denmark. In 2022 her work was featured in a retrospective exhibition alongside Yony Waite and Theresa Musoke at Circle Art Gallery. Her work is included in private and public collections in Kenya, including those of the National Mueeum of Kenya, the Safaricom collection, PwC and MMC Africa Law.

Agnes Waruguru (Kenyan, b. 1994)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Agnes Waruguru treats painting as a site and process for exploring the materiality of objects and their capacity to act as markers of identity and carriers of personal histories. She works predominantly on cotton, using dyeing, pouring and spraying alongside brushwork. These painterly processes are combined with acts of making learnt and inherited from the women in her life. Beadwork, sewing, needlework, embroidery and knitting are all incorporated in her work, intimately connecting aspects of personal identity with traditions of women’s work.

Waruguru received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017. She recently completed a fellowship at the Rijksakademie (2021–2023). In 2020 Waruguru participated in the inaugural edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale, South Africa, and held her first solo exhibition, Small Things to Consider, at Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi. Recent select group exhibitions include: The Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, 2022; A Bit of Unruly Complexity, SANATORIUM Gallery, Istanbul, 2022; I Dreamed A Place For You, Will You Visit?, ROOF-A, Rotterdam, 2022; Lucid Dreams,Circle Art Gallery, 2019; New Threads, Investigating Process and Material, Circle Art Gallery, 2018. Waruguru has completed artist residencies in Lamu and Sydney. She has been nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunsten Prijs for Artists under 35.

Donald Wasswa (Ugandan b. 1984)
Lives and works in Uganda
Donald Wasswa’s multidisciplinary practice explores processes of social and environmental transformation, influences of science and technology, and the changing nature of communication in contemporary societies. Spontaneous encounters with natural or found objects shape his research, with these objects, claimed as art materials, becoming carriers of memories and places. Wasswa’s objects suffer various forms of interference by carving, assembling and arranging, resulting in sculptural forms, three-dimensional paintings and installations. Through this process of material transformation, Wasswa imagines the secret lives of man-made objects and how they might in turn determine future humans.

Wasswa studied Sculpture at Kyambogo University. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Uganda and abroad, including: East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021; Degenerative Evolution of the Living, Absa Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 2018; To Live is to Become, Afriart Gallery, Kampala, 2017; Zikunta, Kampala, 2016. In 2019 Wasswa was one of the selected artists for Ouagadougou Sculpture Biennial and showed at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London. In 2022 he returned to 1-54 and exhibited at Untitled Miami Art Fair with Steve Turner Gallery. He was the 2016 recipient of the Merit Award in the Absa L’Atelier competition. Wasswa is currently based in Kampala where he is the founder/proprietor of Artpunch Studio. In June 2023 he had a solo show at Circle's new gallery space.