By
margaretta wa gacheru (posted 28 November 2018
Niketa Fazal
is a rare kind of Kenyan artist. For one thing, she had to endure a
mini-mid-life crisis before she realized she was meant to be a visual artist.
She’d trained in graphic design in UK and then went into advertising once she
returned home to Kenya. But she didn’t feel fulfilled in that career.
“I’d always
loved the arts,” she told Saturday Nation. But it wasn’t until she’d nearly
reached forty that she finally took the radical step to leave her job and
enroll in Kenyatta University’s fine art department.
Niketa says
she was the oldest student in her class, but she didn’t mind, since she felt
she was doing what she was meant to do.
Now Niketa
is painting up a storm. For her latest series of works, she traveled all around
Nairobi, sketching sites and shooting photographs in order to create a number
of cityscapes. These were recently on display at Village Market, together with
art of two other women artists.
With Yulia
Chvetsova and Milena Weichelt, Niketa mounted an exhibition entitled ‘Diverse
Perspectives.’ Their show only ran from 16th to 19th
November so I confess I didn’t get there. But I managed to get a private
viewing of Niketa’s art when I visited her home and saw both paintings from her
recent show as well as earlier works she’d created this past year.
“2018 has
been a busy year for me,” says Niketa who got her bachelor of fine art in 2011.
“I had a [solo] show in [Delhi] India in February, and another one in Spain in
September which featured my watercolors,” she adds.
Hoping to
organize a group exhibition of water colorist in 2019, Niketa’s works at
Village Market had been primarily painted in acrylics.
“For my
cityscapes, I traveled all around Nairobi, both sketching scenes on site and
taking photographs that I would later use inside my studio,” says Niketa who
says she loves her city.
But she
admits she’s been troubled to see how rapidly the city has changed on the
surface. Her cityscapes reflect those changes since she, like another Kenyan
artist, Paul Njihia, felt compelled to paint construction sites as ‘works in
progress’.
But more
troubling to her is that beneath the surface and behind those high rises, she’s
continued to see the same slums that haven’t changed significantly despite all
the towering walls of cement and steel rising rapidly all around them.
Her show
included both high rises and scenes from Majengo and Kibera. Yet even though
she painted ‘mabati’ shacks situated near a city dump, her perspective never
seems bleak or voyeuristic.
On the
contrary, one work that she entitles ‘White Wash’ highlights not the
dilapidated slum so much as the white sheets hanging on a laundry line in front
of a shack behind which stands the one beautiful purple-blossomed Jacaranda
tree in that neighborhood.
Another one
of her works is a common sight on Landies Road where scores of empty blue metal
barrels are stacked maybe thirty feet off the ground. Her painting portrays the
peculiar beauty of that scene. The man standing below the stack seems minimized
by the magnitude of the metals’ implicit might.
The painting
by Niketa that I find most intriguing is one she created in early 2008 entitled
‘Power Sharing’. The scene is somewhere in Eastlands. What’s most distinctive
about it is the darkened sky overhead which evokes a mood that’s haunting and
almost ominous as was the politicians’ talk of ‘power sharing’. On the other
hand, dark skies could foreshadow much-needed rain. So there’s a paradox to
this painting which reflected a sign of those times.
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