Installation artist shows that home is where the mind goes

Jackie Karuti’s addresses guests at the opening of her latest exhibition, a show titled ‘There Are Worlds Out There They Never Told You About,’ at Goethe-Institut, Nairobi. PHOTO | JULIAN MANJAHI

What you need to know:

  • One feels that Karuti was more concerned with enticing imagination with just a hint of question than with impressing the viewer with elaborate cathedrals and hackneyed answers. 
  • With the current surge in migration in the world, with the European refugee crisis, the African immigrants crisis, and even renegotiations of belonging, as in Brexit and the African Union’s unitary visa for Africa, the exhibition raises pertinent questions for today’s world.
  • Are there worlds out there? Are these worlds valid and viable? What do they hold for me? How do I get there? Do I have to be here? Where do I belong? Can I belong here and there?

To attend Jackie Karuti’s latest exhibition, which is ongoing at Goethe-Institut, is to be transported and mercilessly abandoned in a dark, solitary place. The show, titled ‘There Are Worlds Out There They Never Told You About’ is an eerie experience, where different media come together in a simple yet powerful medley of conceptual art and sensory participation. The mixed-media show comprises

She uses a minimalist, knocked-together style that derives from the repeated use of basic elements – a solitary human, a rock outcrop that creates a vantage point, a satellite dish, cawing crows, a wire fence, paper planes, paper boats, water, a watchtower, a map of the world and an algorithm that appears inconveniently above the heads, like a Rubik’s cube representing many possibilities and permutations of these ‘worlds out there’.

The exhibition felt sparse, but what it lacks in rigour, it makes up for in eloquence, and the final result is an elegant simplicity in the presentation of an idea that is whimsical but also a reality, especially in today’s world – migration. One feels that Karuti was more concerned with enticing imagination with just a hint of question than with impressing the viewer with elaborate cathedrals and hackneyed answers.      

But whether or not you’re impressed, Karuti’s exhibition draws you into an inquiry about movement, migration, stuck-ness and immobility, wanderlust, the allure of the familiar, the urge in humans (and crows) to explore distant worlds and alternate realities. With the current surge in migration in the world, with the European refugee crisis, the African immigrants crisis, and even renegotiations of belonging, as in Brexit and the African Union’s unitary visa for Africa, the exhibition raises pertinent questions for today’s world. Are there worlds out there? Are these worlds valid and viable? What do they hold for me? How do I get there? Do I have to be here? Where do I belong? Can I belong here and there?

But I think even more poignant is the inner journeys that all of us must take, often avoid and that are sometimes thrust upon us by circumstance. These journeys require courage and present obstacles, just as depicted in one of Karuti’s drawing, where a crow seems crashed against a fence.

This is the kind of art that one wishes to see in our public spaces – art that engages the imagination, asks questions and invites people on a journey. It is art that is not done with a commercial end in mind and that is not beholden to any trends or trapped in a socio-economic class bubble. It is accessible, egalitarian and a common good.

Jackie Karuti uses a minimalist, knocked-together style that derives from the repeated use of basic elements – a solitary human, a rock outcrop that creates a vantage point, a satellite dish, cawing crows, a wire fence, paper planes, paper boats, water, a watchtower, a map of the world and an algorithm. PHOTO | JULIAN MANJAHI

SEEKING HOME

I visited Karuti at her studio at Kuona Trust for an encounter with the mind behind this experimental show;

What is the exhibition about, to your mind?

The idea of imagined worlds to which people migrate.  It’s not necessarily literal. The fence is the idea of obstacles you have to overcome. And the obstacles are both real and imagined.

Home is not a physical place where you set up a structure. Home is where your chosen family is – people who accept and love you. Even the world we live in today was once somebody’s imagination.

Displacement is happening, where you’re evicted from a place you always thought was home. For the longest time everyone thought the UK was this utopian world; now people want to leave.

The boats floating on water reference slaves who drowned during the Middle Passage, the African immigrants who drown in the Mediterranean Sea trying to cross into Europe. Is it possible that there is a whole civilization that lives under the ocean? In my drawings, man defies gravity, to exist in the sky. It is storytelling, make-believe and it blurs the line between imagination and reality. 

How does it apply in your own life?

I live in Nairobi, with no connection to where my parents grew up. My dad is Meru and my mum Kikuyu, but I am brought up in Nairobi. Everybody is trying to find a place to sink their roots; looking for authenticity. And we are also increasingly restless, unsure and unstable. What we thought was cast in stone isn’t any more. We are curating our beliefs to suit what works for us in life. Seeking and searching should be normal. It is settling   accepting without questioning   that should be considered strange.

Installation art. What is it about for you?

The biggest transition I have made is from an artist who sits in the studio and produces work to one who instead creates ideas. My work is research-based and experimental. It’s idea-led, not market-led.

Through my work, be it the Labyrinth exhibition at Kuona or the Paper exhibition at Circle Art Gallery, I try to break free from the predictable. I question the usual. Art is not just beautiful any more. Art is powerful. Art questions. 

What’s the best feedback you’ve ever received about your work?

That it’s different from anything coming out of Nairobi.

How do you make money?

Well….the artist’s dilemma.

I sell some of my work. I also get commissions to produce work for exhibitions that are not ‘commercial’, but are idea-driven. I get paid to take part in residencies and I’m also taking an interest in writing.

The price for being an experimental artist is that I spend a lot of money, accumulate ideas and objects that you may discard or that may sit in your studio for long.

Are you the kind of person who goes to trashcans to collect materials?

I am! I’m a chokora. That’s me. But also, my mum is a hoarder. Her house has provided so many materials for me – a door, a lamp, even this seng’enge.

Everywhere I go, I’m always looking around for things people have thrown away and I repurpose stuff.

Who inspires you? … Oh, did I just ask the forbidden question?

Yeah

...Ok. Who influences your work?

I’m right now fascinated by artists who draw, like Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, a Nigerian artist based in Brooklyn. She recently met with my friend Tahir Karmali… and I was just like, Oh my God! The South African William Kentridge is so versatile; I also love Njideka Akunyili Crosby who is also based in the US, for her collages. Then there’s London-based Phoebe Boswell and Jim Chuchu right here, whose work I absolutely love.

You’re headed for a residency at the prestigious Gasworks Gallery in London…

Yes. I like it because they are keen on experimentation. I’m not meant to have an exhibition at the end of it. I’m to be led by the place, learn, attend lectures, collect ideas, visit places, talk to people and at the end of it, have an open studio session where I present my ideas.

Sometimes it’s important to step back, not produce, but instead focus on other things.