Longinos Nagila (Kenyan, b. 1982)

For available works please contact gallery@circleartagency.com or danda@circleartagency.com

Longinos Nagila is a young experimental multi media visual artist living and working in Nairobi. Primarily focusing on video art and the exploration of digital imagery, Longinos’ work is influenced by a deep love of early cinema and black and white photography, which he blends with paint and transferred images on paper and canvas. After graduating from the Buruburu institute of Fine Arts, Nairobi in 2009 he studied documentary and film making at the Apulia Film Commission in Bari, Italy.

Nagila’s practice investigates the process and implications of mass production, industrialization and rapid urbanization. Most rencently, Nagila has taken a notably formal turn, centering on the relationship between shapes and surfaces. This work on paper is also a personal interrogation of what constitutes an art object, the materials in art and the process of art making from an anthropological point of. He approaches this work as a form of performance involving the work and the viewer. Its not enough to view this work from a single standing position. The process of making this work – the very precise, repetitive, controlled manipulation of paper with a blade has itself taken on a performative quality for him.

Nagila has participated in numerous exhibitions both locally and internationally, along with participation in several art fairs. Recent group exhibitions include: Proximity to Power, Circle Art Gallery/ Goethe Insitut Nairobi, 2017; African Voices National Gallery of Zimbabwe, 2017; Freedom Flight Refuge, Circle Art Gallery, 2016, Error X, Ostrale, Dresden, 2016. He has had several solo exhibitions including: In Search of Alternative Utopias, The Art Space, Nairobi, 2017; Democracy My Piss, Kuona Trust, Nairobi, 2016; Technicians of the Sacred, The Art Space, Nairobi, 2016. Nagila’s work has also been shown in international art fairs – AKAA Paris, 2016, and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London, 2017.