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GALLERIES: Famous five look at life in the city

Friday January 20 2017
havana

Havana, by Michael Soi. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

The midnight flight to London takes off at 11.50pm and Bombay duck is a fish. The Eternal Flame that commemorates the glorious dead of two world wars in the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is reignited at 6.30pm every day… and the Kenyan sculptor Baldy Osborne has a fine head of hair.

I love life’s little quirks and I can tell you also that the best place to get a sense of the heart of Nairobi is not in the CBD but at a busy little township about 15 kilometres from the city.

To prove it, five artists from the Kenyan capital are showing 32 paintings under the banner Nairobi Inspirations, at the Banana Hill Art Gallery.

Of the five, two died tragically young in the last couple of years and this exhibition therefore, by bringing them together with the contemporaries who were their friends, also serves as a moving tribute to them both: Ashif Malamba and Omosh Kindeh.

The surprise is that the lot of them — add Michael Soi, Thom Ogonga and Patrick Mukabi — washed up at Banana Hill; a gallery known for showing artists who value enthusiasm as highly as academic ability.

That they have done so is a tribute to the husband-and-wife gallery owners, the painters Shine Tani and Rahab Shine, who have earned the respect of the entire East African art world by sticking at it for more than 25 years…. offering a vast hall — 300 square metres with more space wanted — to the often unknown, unsung but committed young artists from throughout the region.

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Their reward now is to attract these five famous Kenyans who are on most people’s lists of artists to check out.

For Malamba are shown seven boldly satirical works, effectively posters that promote his hopes for peace, and belief in the corruption of the church and the evil of terrorism with humour, grace and the forceful style typical of the Maasai Mbili studio he helped to establish.

Kindeh’s nine paintings are elegiac testaments to the crowded tenements of the Eastlands estates where he lived and worked. They show why he was so well regarded by his peers.

The pair of paintings called Concrete Jungle sum up the story. Towering blocks of apartments, the balconies stitched in with string, seem to have been designed to create alienation, yet the residents swirl and eddy both on the balconies and in the compounds below. They appear to be in uniforms; maroon, white and grey.

Are these schoolchildren then… or more likely is their dress code Kindeh’s metaphor for the uniformity of lives reduced to subsistence in this hostile environment? He is not here to tell us but his paintings live on.

Mukabi finds village life within the city… women collect water (at the standpipe rather than the river) — and they sell food in the street markets and, in one case, are seen offering bananas to a group of mechanics gathered around a dismantled engine.

Mukabi’s eight works include a tender study of two young girls and a simple painting of a bucket on a stool. He is good at stripping away clutter and highlighting the essentials.

Ogonga and Soi scour the clubs and cafes and find what is found everywhere… the timeless boho dance of men and women, women and men.

Ogonga’s girls wait patiently in Slow Night, a study in monochrome grey… not 50 shades but maybe three or four. The impulse is the same. His clubbers display, talk, interact, drink and appraise. It’s the oldest game still played today. They are skilfully presented in a sort of sub-Egon Schiele way — all jumpy lines and sharp angles — and all with the artist’s hallmark crescent eyes.

I would like to think they indicate his subjects’ dream-like state and not a simple refusal to open their eyes to the world.

Soi has no such trouble. He shows five paintings all of which promote his familiar theme… buxom young women apparently exploited by men but who, with their wide eyes, pouting mouths or the tilt of their hips, display quite clearly who is in charge.

His is a brilliant social commentary presented in a simplistic cartoon-like manner that both beguiles and excites. From Nairobi we have such familiarities as his Havana (the Westlands club and restaurant where he often shows his work) complete with a Chinese man eyeing the goodies, and Java Girls, a sharply vertical composition of two girls, one holding a cardboard beaker of coffee.

So what do these five artists tell us about the heart of the Kenyan capital? That it is vibrant; welcoming to foreigners willing to pay the price; a place full of prospects but also of desperation for those who arrive seeking opportunities but are unable to find them; a place famously packed with the temptations of les girls and a city marred by corruption, but enlivened with humour and bursting with life.

From Banana Hill you can look down at the distant capital shimmering in the heat. The allusion is clear.

Go see the show.

Learn more about Nairobi and how these artists have captured its heart… by visiting a little town some distance outside the city.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, an arts consultancy based in Nairobi.

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