SHABU MWANGI AN ARTIST WITH A WISE HEART AND OLD SOUL

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted May 13, 2024)

Shabu Mwangi is on a trajectory of enlightenment that is both rising and deepening every day. In this process, one of his central concerns is staying connected to his community and to humanity at large.

It's a concern made visible in his current exhibition at Circle Art Gallery. Entitled ‘Un)Contained Turbulence’, this his third solo show at Circle, reveals Shabu’s knack for the narrative as he reflects on a myriad of broad topics rarely explored by other             East African artists. They include the consequences of globalization, of capitalism, and fear as they impact whole communities.

Fear, as he sees it, has a particularly profound role to play in generating the turbulence and greed leading to untold tragedies.

One of his works that reflects on the global political scene is entitled ‘Distortion in Global Politics’. There are others that further expose how closely the artist observes global dynamics and correlates them to circumstances closer to home where he feels leaders need to be held accountable. It’s especially true when their constituents are crying for help, as in a work like ‘Crippling State’ in which a disabled man looks  like a Nairobi cripple out in traffic begging for bread.

This is not the first time Shabu has addressed such issues. But this is one directly relates to this moment when autocracies are on the rise with their hardline insensitivities as portrayed in a painting like ‘Agreeing Not to Agree”. Such bogus ‘agreements’ between insecure so-called leaders has also led to countless coups d’etats in Africa, which is another one of the 17 portraits painted in oils on canvas in this show. ‘Failed Coup II’ is all about the way one Army General managed to arrest rebels and throw the one in the painting behind bars.

Shabu has such a sophisticated perspective on power relations that he can paint a work like ‘Coercive State’ showing why wananchi need to escape such oppressive conditions. 

As Shabu sees it, fear and greed are both underlying factors in the land-grabbing that was most apparent during colonial times, when land was swiped from local populations who were sucked into master-slave sorts of power-relations related to the material value of land. Yet in a piece like ‘We belong to the land’, Shabu seems to say that the land owns us. Neither we nor the land grabber can actually own her since Mother Earth will remain here long after all of us are gone.   

Then there’s another disrupting turbulence that Shabu lays at the feet of insecure leaders who disregard their social commitments to gobble up all the resources, including the donor assistance meant to help the poor. But even the healthy are jobless because funds meant to generate work to employ them have been robbed. So many have lost hope and resort to booze, drugs, or suicide. What’s required, Shabu claims is a ‘Present Assertion’ by the oppressed to defy the odds and become successfully self-employed. The trick, he implies, is for youth not to lose hope.

‘State of Waiting’ is an autobiographic work in which the two characters are himself and his mother. “She is the one who stood with me when everyone else treated me like a lost cause,’ says the co-founder of Wajuukuu Art Centre who just had a major exhibition in Germany and will soon be off to set up another show in Morocco. He was also scheduled for a London exhibition but had to be postponed for the current Circle Art one. Nonetheless, when the Circle show delayed, he had to send works meant for Circle to London straight away.

“That meant I had to work swiftly to produce this body of works,” he reveals. Yet there’s nothing slipshod in either his mode of painting or his message. It’s as if he needed that sense of urgency to allow the free flow of ideas to come forth as they have. His painterly strokes have also been expressive at an emotional as well as an intellectual level.

Ultimately, a painting like ‘Trust the Path’ pretty much summarizes Shabu’s message to the youth, the disheartened, and to those in need of reassurance and comfort.

Some might say Shabu has a Christ-complex. But the reality is that he has seen the disconnect between the traditional bond of the wise grandparents and their children’s children. Now in his forties, he seems to feel one way to assist his community is to share his personal experience and wisdom with youth who care to listen. He has an old soul and an abundance to share.                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

THREE WOODEN CROSSES, KU STUDENTS' VERSION

Kenyatta University theatre students staged their version of ‘Three Wooden Crosses” last Friday night (May 3) on a distinctly untheatrical stage in Harrison Hall.

But making do with the best space the school had to offer, the show opened (an hour late) with a heart-wrenching monologue on the unpredictability of life by a ‘little girl’ named Angel (Fridah Chemutai) who promises to illustrate her point with what is coming next.

The rest of the play, scripted, and directed by Michael Mwangi, is a flashback, set inside a brothel.

The young sex-workers are having fun, dancing and laughing among themselves, apart from one.  Maya (Mercy Kajuju) is drunk and looking miserable. She had gotten pregnant by one of her clients and she’d planned on keeping it. But she tragically miscarried and weeps now for having lost the one way she thought she could use to escape the tyranny of their pimp (Evans Kimuli).

But he’s more interested in one of the other sex-workers, Tiana (Philomena Wambui) who’s dressed up differently from the erotic attire of the other girls. She looks more like any other secretary in town, not like her skimpily-dressed ‘sisters’ who she plans to leave that very day. She wants to be done with sex-work, to go back and be with her child, who happens to be Angel. But that’s easier said than done as we see when he arrives to find his ‘whores’ (as he calls Tiana) amusing themselves rather than doing their job, which is to solicit men and make him money.

He calls Tiana aside and asks her to do one last job. She rebels, but he reminds her with several hard slaps that she still ‘belongs’ to him. He proceeds to do the classic psychological put-down of the woman by mentally and verbally beating down her self-confidence, making her feel like nobody and nothing. It’s ugly and outdated but unfortunately, it’s still a chauvinistic male method to control the woman. The physical beating is what finally leads to her agreeing to one last client. As it turns out, he’s a blind man who believes he has come to a reputable hotel, not a brothel.

His first inkling of it is when Tiana tries to seduce him, and he is shocked. Then the pimp comes in and confirms his thoughts, whereupon the blind man wants to leave immediately. But then, he too is at the mercy of pimp who has planned to poison him for some undisclosed reason. We assume it’s because the man is rich. In any case, pimp gives Tiana a glass of water steeped in poison for her to give to the innocent blind guy. He drinks it, and sure enough, he dies.

Tiana is stunned by the ease with which Pimp can kill a man. He looks prepared to bump her off too since she knows too much. But he’s busy reminding her that the glass containing the poison had her finger prints all over it. He’d planned to kill her and then there would be no contest over who killed the blind guy.

But Tiana’s a fighter and quick thinker. She grabs the glass, throws it down hard to break, then grabs the most jagged-piece of the broken glass, which still has poison on the sliver. Then she struggles with Pimp until she can stab him with her ingenious blade. He too dies, and she runs with Angel who’d been waiting to flee with her mom.

Meanwhile, the play has a parallel story of a pastor (Abrahim Mwangi) who visits prisons and meets an inmate, Jack (Fredruck Ochieng) on the day before he is set to get out. The pastor is so impressed by Jack’s performance, he offers him a job saving souls. So once Jack’s released, they meet and start traveling together.

The two stories meet at a bus stop where Jack and the Pastor encounter Tiana and Angel.

The Pastor offers to assist the mother and child. Initially, Tiana declines his offer, but then, goes into sex-worker mode in order to ask him for fare.

Angel sees her mom try to seduce this innocent man, and in frustration runs away from her mother for good. There’s a futile search for Angel, after which they board the bus in mime-style. But the bus crashes and three of the four passengers die. Thus, the title, Three Wooden Crosses.

Unfortunately, the ending is clumsy so it’s unclear that Tiana is the one who survives. but that’s the play’s end.

Lots of unresolved questions remain, leaving us dangling and dissatisfied and wanting more clarity and resolution.

 

 

 

 

ELUNGAT PETER AT ARDHI GALLERY---DRAFT

 Being the baby in his father’s first litter of kids, Peter Elungat first learned to paint by copying the artworks of his oldest brother (Hosea who was at least a decade older than he was). He was barely out of nappies at the time.

“Art was fascinating to me from an early age,” he tells BD Life. “I used to love reading the Friday Nation (which my father brought home regularly) since it used to showcase great artists like Mary Collis and Jak Katarikawe. I also found a calendar that had their artworks in it, and I would copy their paintings,” he says shamelessly. He hadn’t had funds to attend art school, so he literally learned his painterly skills by emulating those      artists he admired.

He eventually made it to the Kuona Trust which had a library where he had his first encounters with artists like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio whose hot-blooded passion so apparent in his art particularly impressed Elungat. Kuona Is also where he met Kenyan artists like Patrick Mukabi, Richard Kimathi, Jimnah Kimani, Michael Soi, Kyalo Justus, Maggie Otieno, and many others.

Kuona is also where he met Carol Lees of One Off Gallery who helped him have his first solo show at Yaya Centre in 2001. His close association with Carol and One Off, wich morphed for ten years into RaMoMa, and back into One Off lasted until 2017 when he chose to disconnect from the gallery system altogether and strike out on his own.

It was a radical move on Elungat’s part, but he’d felt a strong impulse to assert his artistic freedom and independence. Some people felt he was ungrateful for all that One Off had done for him. But others appreciated his joining the ranks of a myriad of struggling Kenyan artists. Either way, Elungat felt he was being true to himself.

“There was a proverb posted on one wall at Kuona, which I’ll never forget. It read (in translation) ‘Be committed to the purpose that brought you here.’ His purpose, he says, is to allow the free flow of ideas to pass through him onto canvas.

It sounds slightly esoteric, but actually, Elungat admits he doesn’t see himself so much as a creator as a messenger.

In his current exhibition at Ardhi Gallery entitled “Life Size”, one can see that soulful sense expressed in works like ‘Echoes of the Spirit’, ‘Sound of and Angel’, and The Biography of a Spirit. And even in the one sculpture he has in the show, it’s entitled ‘Soul of a Tree’. Not that he aspires to express himself as a sculptor. This five- foot by five-foot abstract work made with ‘gifted’ wire, acacia tree branches, and baby bamboo polls evolved by serendipitous means. Now that he has shifted his studio to his home in Kitengela, he has a garden where he’s planted flowers and other decorative plants, lots of leafy vegetables and spices, but also               acacia trees and bamboo. Having pruned one acacia, he saw its branches being the frame of the work. But it was like the same process in which he paints, which is gradually, layer by layer. That’s how the bamboo got into the act and the wire gifted to him by a neighbour. Today it stands at the entrance of the exhibition which includes two women artists, Olga---and Lily --- whose works occupy a whole other wing of this vast gallery.  

All of the artist’s works in this show, apart from three which share a dark chiaroscuro                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     style and are practically half the size of painting that feels quite alien to all the rest of his works, except that Elungat’s drawings are beautiful.

Yet the show as a whole reflects a tremendous diversity in its subject matter, while all are painted in oil on canvas and all have never been shown in public before.

      

The exhibition itself happened by serendipitous means. Both Elungat and Christine Oguna, the co-owner of Ardhi Gallery happened to be visiting the Mukuru Artists Collective on the same day. Elungat had already begun having artists working in residence with him at his studio in Kitengela. And Christine had planned on having an all-women’s exhibition but postponed it temporarily, but some of the young women who;d planned to be in it could be good candidates for one of Elungat; artists residencies. So they combined forces: she directed four young women to apply to go to Kitengela, and he agreed. It’s just ending now, and all are happy with their collaboration