Viva Mexico! Miriam Kyambi’s celebration of space and culture

One by one the women came to sit in front of the mirror and do their make-up.

Some finished quickly; some took longer; all took great care.

And each of them, when finished, gave themselves a sideways look in the mirror, smacking their lips to spread the colour evenly, and checking the overall look beneath lowered lashes.

“That last look is something all women seem to do — I do it myself,” said artist Miriam Syowia Kyambi, who had set up the cosmetics table in Santa Rosa, hugging a mountainside above Mexico City,

Kyambi had invited her neighbours to try out the make-up while she filmed them — and the resulting split-screen video (it lasts nine minutes and is on a loop for continuous showing) can be seen as part of a startling and innovative exhibition that opened at the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi last week.

Kyambi has just returned from a two-month study tour of Mexico, generously sponsored by the Mexican government through its embassy in Nairobi.

The artist, now aged 30 and born and raised in Nairobi, went first to Mexico City where she was taken under the wing of one of the country’s leading painters, Edmundo Aquino.

Kyambi stayed in Santa Rosa, with the city spread out in a haze below, and revelled in the old Spanish colonial architecture, the elegant decay of the crumbling walls and the warmth of the people.

From there she visited Oaxaca (pronounced Wah-haka) and devoted herself to what she calls “a research into identity and the exterior space as it relates to art.”

This exhibition is the result of that search.

Underpinning the show is a series of four linocuts of church cupolas that form its leitmotif.

Curator James Muriuki has massed some 40 of these prints on the wall that welcomes visitors.

It is a neat idea because firstly it proves that Kyambi can draw with economy and force — and therefore immediately win the respect and confidence of visitors — and secondly it prepares them for some of the rather more difficult installations on view.

But first there are a series of studies trapped between perspex sheeting to enjoy.

In these, Kyambi has combined scraps of paper, flakes of dried paint, stucco and other detritus taken from the walls of Santa Rosa, occasionally adding prints from the original four linocuts of the cupolas.

They physically bring Mexico City to Nairobi… and help us begin to confront the underlying purpose of the exhibition: An exploration of the possibilities of creating a cultural fabric that dignifies post-colonial societies — whether in Mexico with its history of more than 200 years of independence, or Kenya with almost 50 years since Uhuru.

A number of photographs continue the theme.

They were taken with a small happy-snap camera (a Nikon Coolpix, for those who care to know) but I was stunned by the quality of the close-ups of those very walls that Kyambi sampled for her perspex installations. I thought at first that some were collages, such was the diamond sharp focus of her prints.

One of the installations is a peep show, a mirrored box (mounted on a camera tripod) in which little plastic figures whirl, dance, make love and generally pose. We are invited to become people watchers, like the artist herself.

In another installation, placed centrally in the hall, small wax figures are suspended from clothes hangers as though hung out to dry.

They turn slowly in the light on wires that writhe like branches between two hinged and battered doors.

On the back of one door hang a number of strings, plaited and tarred. They represent hair.

The piece is called Between Two Doors and is offered as an exploration of the artist’s interior space (and through hers, our own.) It also deals with the search for a cultural fabric that can be worn with pride. Again, the cupolas appear.

This I think is the seminal work of Kyambi’s exhibition. It is herself.

There were no drawings, nor any easel paintings… but with videos revealing the change of identities through masks created by make-up, plus prints, photographs and sculptural installations, Kyambi has shown herself to be a stunningly diverse artist who achieves a multilayered quality with whichever medium she chooses.

It is altogether a mature and stimulating show, one that marks her out as one of Kenya’s most imaginative young artists.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email: fwhalley@gmail.com