WHAT BETTER PLACE TO SHOW ART THAN ONE’S APARTMENT

WHAT BETTER PLACE TO SHOW ART THAN ONE’S APARTMENT

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

The Apartment is a brand-new art venue in Parklands where one can come and see beautiful art ‘by appointment only’. But once a connection is made between yourself and the Sudanese-Somali filmmaker Azza Satti, it won’t be difficult to find your way to her place where she is currently showing stunning works of art fresh from Khartoum. She is exhibiting paintings by 14 Sudanese artists, practically all of whom are graduates of the University of Khartoum’s School of Fine Art.

Nairobi is no stranger to Sudanese artists. In fact, right now at Red Hill Gallery, one of the earliest ones to arrive in Nairobi, Abushariaa Ahmed, is having a one-man Retrospective exhibition. Unfortunately, none of his paintings and prints are for sale since they belong to Red Hill’s founder, curator Hellmuth Rossler-Musch who has a special affinity for Abushariaa’s art.

And at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Don Handah and his team selected another Sudanese legend, El Tayeb Dawelbeit, to showcase up until the end of September. But what makes Azza’s selection of painters quite different is that all the artists in her showcase are based in Khartoum. They are working and exhibiting there. Their art has only come to Kenya by way of a partnership between Azza and the Mojo Gallery in Khartoum.

“I was visiting the city and wandered into Mojo where I met the gallery owners, Yusuf and Mustafa,” she tells BDLife a week after the show opened on Fedha Road. “My background is in the visual arts so we decided to collaborate. They will send me fresh new works by artists that they like and I’ll select from among them to show here. After that, they send them,” she adds.

Receiving 57 works of art by wildly talented contemporary artists posed a challenge to Azza who currently consults for Hivos and has several other projects going on. But she spent years studying art, in Nairobi at the International School of Kenya as well as overseas, in Brussels and Paris where her diplomat-dad was based at various times in her early years. She also got degrees in the arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. So, handling the art of 14 painters is actually one of the easier aspects of her current life. “I’m just happy to give artists an opportunity to be seen [and sold] in the best space that I have to offer,” she says, admitting that her space is a two-bedroom flat, meaning it is not a mansion, nor a gallery, nor even a four-bedroom house. “But I do have a private garden where I want to stage an event at the end of the exhibition on October 29th. That’s when we’ll have food and conversation, and jazz from several countries and continents,” she adds.

Tastefully displaying works like Khalib Rahman’s miniature landscapes next to Haytham Almugdam’s purple-powered piece is eye-catching, especially because Haytham’s art is on Azza’s beautiful poster that went out all over social media. But every corner of Azza’s flat has art that appeals. There are the black and white calligraphic paintings by Jaffar Azzam contrasting Mohamed Faduli’s cluster of bold-colored minarets backed up by a stunning sunset decked in a blend of bright red and orange hues. Faduli also has elements of calligraphy in his art, only he mixes color with calligraphic curves in a more semi-abstract style that also mesmerizes one’s eyes. Meanwhile, as Azza shares her paintings with me, I realize that she is a storyteller in her own right. She has stories to tell about every artist. One of the most compelling is the one she calls ‘The Wedding of Zein’ which she explains is actually the name of a wonderful Sudanese novel by Tayeb Salih that I must read. But a wedding is definitely happening in the large painting by Ahmed Elnahas. All attention is centred around the drummer who is ushering in the community to the wedding site. Tarig Nasre’s ochre-toned work featuring figurative characters is another one that Azza especially likes because the story it tells is about a young girl whose dreams are things she shares, and which then get translated by the artist into a jigsaw puzzle of colors and light.

The diversity of subject matter, technique, and color arrayed in these works are all amazing. What’s even more surprising is that despite her Apartment not being the easiest place to find, people have come there with the intent to see, appreciate, and buy this contemporary art.