KAMWATHI PROJECTS PRECARIOUS POSSIBILITIES
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted March 7, 2022)
Peterson Kamwathti’s
current exhibition entitled P(a)lace, which opened last weekend at One Off
Gallery quickly revealed the artist hadn’t slacked off during the COVID curfew.
On the contrary, he used the lockdown to reflect on his own personal experience
and interrogate concepts of time and space (or place) in the broadest philosophical sense.
In this body of work, Kamwathi,
one of Kenya’s most acclaimed conceptual artists, examines time and space at
both the individual and collective levels as well as at the local and the global.
And he does so in ways that are inventive yet disturbing as he taps into
inexplicable feelings of aloneness or even angst that some may have felt during
those difficult days.
Kamwathi
also experiments and innovates using many of the techniques in his artistic
tool box, from drawing, painting, printing and stenciling to air brushing and
blending subtle hues into his works. He also employs a broad mix of media,
including charcoal, colored pencils, carbon paper, and pastels as he works his
way through a complex set of concepts, layer by layer. He even works with maps
to interrogate the notions of boundaries, borders, confinement as they have
existed in Kenya’s present and in the past.
A few of Kamwathi’s
‘experiments’ appear in the exhibition as ‘Studies’ for the larger work, ‘Dunia
Wiki Hii II’. One is of a man doing a handstand on a pair of skulls. In another
the man does his handstand atop a big buffalo skull which the artist tells
BDLife is significant in that the living buffalo is commonly seen as a tourist
attraction, and if manifest in art gets classified as mere ‘souvenir art’.
“But no one
can say the same about a buffalo skull,” Kamwathi says. “It carries different
significance altogether,” he adds with a smile.
“I don’t
actually paint,’ he tells one collector of his art. “I assemble,” which may be
a way of saying his art is layered both in terms of his techniques as well as
in the meanings infused into every layer.
The piece
uses specific images as symbols of time. From the pre-colonial, there is a
section devoted to fossilized rocks like ones found in archeological digs near
Lake Magadi.
In another
section of the work is a group of squatting individuals who might be migrants
or even Mau Mau detainees. The ambiguity of the image is part of what disturbs.
Then just next to the squatters is a chess piece. It’s the Queen, a reference (he
suggests) to the Queen who presided over the British Empire when Kenya suddenly
got confined by colonial boundaries. Then in the foreground of the work is a
boy doing a backward stretch, his fingers just below another layer of meaning
in which a woman bends over as if to almost touch her toes or carry an
invisible burden.
In all of
Kamwathi’s works in P(a)laces, the issue of confinement is apparent, whether
the individual is standing alone on a pedestal as in ‘Beacon III’, or bending
over his own separate carpet as in ‘Frame of Reference II’ or squatting as in ‘Untitled/Noble
Savage’. In almost every work, there’s an awkwardness to the individual’s form,
apart from the acrobats who seem to have some control over their body movement.
There’s one
of his paintings that suggests the possibility of freedom from the entrapments
that we see expressed either as chicken wire or cobwebs or road barracks, all
of which are visible in one or the other of his works. And that is of a baby
boy standing alone, aloof, above a mountain top, as if he was floating and
free. Yet when I express curiosity about the upside-down table above the little
boy’s head, Kamwathi admits the table could also be seen as a confining object
capable of limiting the boy’s freedom of movement.
P(a)laces is
a sobering show, but it once again reveals Kamwathi is an artist psychically
attuned to the soulful rhythms and tempo of our times.
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