JESS ATIENO COMES HOME WITH VISUAL GIFTS AT RED HILL

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (jANUARY 24,2023) Jess Atieno’s solo exhibition at Red Hill Gallery turned into a magnificent multimedia phenomenon last weekend when she was joined with contemporary dancers and marvelous musicians, including James Mweu and Michel Ongaro. The inclusion of contemporary dancers accompanied by Ongaro, a musician I think of as Kenya’s brilliant version of Stevie Wonder, was the idea of Red Hill gallerists Hellmuth and Erica Rossler-Musch. “Remember, we have had [contemporary] dancers perform at previous exhibition openings,” Erica reminds BDLife. It had worked well before, as when Liza MacKay included a performance by another contemporary dancer at the opening of her pre-COVID solo show at Red Hill. But the inclusion of Michel on percussion and guitar together with flutist Oneko Arika seemed even more fitting and relevant to the theme of Jess’s exhibition.

‘The Moon has gone under the sea’ is the title of her ‘audacious’ show, one which brings to mind more questions than answers when one pays attention to what she has done to create her paintings. One can’t even be sure ‘painting’ is the pertinent term to describe what she has created and described as collage. For even more than collage, the creation of Jess’s images involves multiple techniques, methods, archival materials, and perhaps most importantly, research. The images she presents on canvas at Red Hill are all part of a larger conceptual art project that aims to examine archival imagery representing Africans as seen from a colonial perspective.

Then, flowing from that initial research, she aims (I think) to challenge the dominant narratives that the images reflect. Then, beyond the challenge, her intent is ultimately to change the narratives that diminish the dignity of Africans, replacing them with empowering imagery. One of those biases is that African people had no history or culture before colonialism came to bring them out of darkness and their ‘primitive’ incivility. That is why, until recently, most African art could only be found in ethnographic museums not art institutes since supposedly Africans never produced art. During an ‘Artist Talk’ given at her opening (just hours before her flight back to US where she’s currently lecturing at the Art Institute School of Chicago), Jess described how her research in public archives led to her eventually finding a French man online who was selling postcards featuring the sort of colonial images she was looking for.

“The postcards that I worked with [for this show] represent Kenyans and Ugandans,” she explained. But the images that she’s assembles have been disrupted by her reconstruction process which is fascinating and complex. For instance, one of her paintings entitled ‘A Song to the Silent Sisters’, began as an old photograph of several African girls seated together, but naked from the waist up. In order to disrupt and transform the biased viewpoint of the erotic, exotic and sexualized African female body, Jess removed the naked breasts and replaced them with lovely floral imagery. And in ‘Song in a Foreign Land’, she features the only European in the show. She is a Caucasian Catholic nun represented at the top of a cluster of African children. The placement of the characters is pyramidal while Jess’s splashy use of a fire-engine red color suggests that something violent is going on, violent as in removing children from their indigenous culture so they’ll more easily imbibe Western culture. And just as Jess took pains to find out the nationality of the people in the postcards, she was also able to identify places where some of the images come from. For instance, her most precious work (priced at Sh800,000), the ‘Sultan’ may be so highly valued by the artist because he looks like one of the few images among her postcards in which a man retains his self-respect. Perhaps that is because of his power, wealth, and leadership, representing the Omani Arabs who ruled over the Coast in pre-colonial times. But even he got a magical makeover from Jess, who highlighted elements of his strength and dignity.

Given the complexity of her ambitious goals, one can see why the Rossler-Musch’s felt inspired to invite contemporary dancers and musicians to perform at her opening. When I first met Jess in 2015, it was when she had her first solo show at Kuona Trust. Entitled ‘Full-Frontal’, it featured nude women of all shapes and sizes, some with bulges and giant bottoms, others skinny and wrinkled. It was my first encounter with this ‘audacious’ woman who has evolved and traveled far since then. But she’s still audacious, still interrogating issues that demand our attention.