The Ties That Bind

04.05.-28.05.2025
Goethe-Institut Nairobi

Curated by Niklas Obermann

This exhibition showcases five artists that were selected for the Sasa Nairobi Fellowship in 2024. Initiated by the Goethe-Institut to bridge the gap between artistic theory and practice, the year-long programme offered them an opportunity to develop their practice and engage more deeply with artistic discourses and research-based approaches. Bringing together their practices, the exhibition is diverse in aesthetics and themes – each piece an invitation into a unique artistic realm, but also an opportunity to see what unites these upcoming artists.    

Locating themselves at the intersection of individual and collective identities, the artists negotiate not just their own experiences, but the complex relationalities that underpin our identities. Wallace Juma investigates our relationship with the natural environment, and how its destruction affects and reshapes communities. The fading photographs of Joel Lukhovi mirror a similar destruction, and speak towards the entanglement of personal and public memories. Exploring more personal family dynamics, Precious Narotso takes her experience of being abandoned by her father and develops it into a much larger consideration on family relations, trauma and grief. The experiences of women and their labour move to the foreground in Sachy Atieno´s installation, investigating how histories are inscribed into fabrics and the way they are utilized as a mode of self-expression. Ultimately, in Sammy Mutinda´s installation we enter a space in which artistic creation allows us to reimagine our relationship to the world. 

The artists here trace the ties that constitute our societies, sometimes empowering, sometimes constraining, and oftentimes contradictory. Art then allows us to lean into the irreconcilable, the odd, the uncanny – to embrace the tensions within ourselves and our societies as a site of productive disorder. Acknowledging our interdependencies, as well as our need for self-expression, art here becomes a way of shedding old ties while inevitably forming new ones.