Magazine
Iron fists in velvet gloves
Man in the mask ... Peterson Kamwathi and one of his pictures
Posted Monday, July 6 2009 at 00:00
If you want to see what one of Kenya’s finest artists is up to, visit the Goethe Institut in Nairobi.
For there, until July 23 Peterson Kamwathi is showing a series of huge drawings — each some 5ft by 8ft long — that one reader was quick to tell me make up the finest exhibition ever seen in Kenya.
That is a huge claim and one perhaps made in the excitement of the moment, on first exposure to these astonishing works.
Yet I must agree that I have seen few shows so powerful.
Kamwathi has combined formidable technical ability with a strong message that strikes to the heart of the 2007 election fiasco.
Of all the artwork produced in response to the poll and the subsequent violence (including the photographic exhibition Kenya Burning) this strikes me as the most penetrating.
The fact that it is a work of the hand and the eye and without the mechanical intervention of a camera makes it even stronger, more raw, a greater assault on the senses.
The life-size drawings were not intended as a polemic, Kamwathi told me. Rather they represented his “reflections” on the events of 2007.
I suggested that irrespective of his intentions they nonetheless amounted to a sustained attack on the venality and incompetence of almost everyone connected with that “cursed election” and the violence it triggered.
“Yes, it is a reaction to the violence although there are no scenes of violence in the exhibition. It relates more to the institutions than the people involved,” Kamwathi went on.
He added, somewhat elliptically: “I came out of the water. I am no longer in the water, yet I am wet.”
This all seems a trifle esoteric from anyone other than a Zen master, but I presume it means we have all been marked by that election and the marks are still on our skins.
The exhibition flyer tells us that the drawings give “room for reflection rather than confrontation or making judgements.”
To me, Kamwathi’s apparent wish to distance himself from the judgemental seems somewhat political, if not disingenuous.
Was the man who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square simply rooted to the spot in surprise while reflecting on the unexpected appearance of an armoured column, or was he trying to make a point? Quite.
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