by margaretta wa gacheru (june 2, 2024)
Munene
kariuki is a visionary and a realist combined. As a painter currently having
his first solo exhibition at 0ne 0ff gallery, one can see he also has both an
intuitive insight and first-hand knowledge of what most people want and feel
they need to obtain the quality of life that is fit for themselves and their
families.
How he
translates all that knowledge into visually interesting art is the stuff of his
showcase of work that he entitles ‘Beyond’ at One Off. It’s the visionary in
him that sees what’s required to get beyond all the obstacles, constraints,
restrictions, and barriers, both physical and mental. It’s also the
undercurrent of thought that offers hope despite the distress that people on
the move are currently feeling.
Migration is
a theme that Munene had been exploring long before the covid lockdown laid out
so many barriers to people’s movement on a worldwide scale, not just on Kenyans’.
People’s motivation for migrating ranged from mainly wars or economic hardship.
Yet what Munene captures in his art are mainly portraits of people encountering
specific obstacles to their momentum.
For
instance, a work like ‘Remittance’ relates to the one who manages to get
overseas, but then he’s constrained by family pressure to remit funds meant to
sustain whole families. Yet little does family understand the hardships
encountered by the one expected to remit.
His illustration of unemployment entitled
‘Seat 1’ and ‘Seat 2’ is a diptych, each side filled with a room-full of people
but just one seat. Munene’s symbolism is often accessible, but in some
instances not so much. In several of the 33 paintings in this show, many use
either red and yellow ribbons or barrels to symbolize the obstacle impeding the
migrants’ movement ahead.
His ‘Labor
Export’ feels especially relevant as Munene has painted men standing in a box.
It’s the sort that farmers pack their potatoes or carrots, onions or cut
flowers in. In light of news that Kenyan troops are heading to Haiti or the
Middle East where they’ll fight Houthi rebels, it’s Munene the visionary who
painted his ‘Labor Export’ long before the President volunteered Kenyans to go.
Meanwhile,
the precarious nature of a migrant’s life (be he coming from Eritrea, Nicaragua
or Sudan or Russia, India, or Pakistan) is suggested in his painting ‘The
Journey’. In it, there’s only an inflatable boat and two hangman’s nooses. “You
see that key painted next to the boat?” he asks BD Life. “The key is meant to
represent a successful journey, but you can see there’s no success here,” he
adds referring specifically all the African migrants who cross the Sahara in
order to reach Libya where
they prepare their boat, hopefully to get them across the Mediterranean Sea.
But more frequently, it does not.
Other topics
that Munene covers in this show range widely from ‘gender imbalance’ and
‘Biometrics’ as a form of global surveillance to being ‘Distressed’ and other mental
issues related to stress and the adage illustrated by Munene to mean to ‘Tighten
up your belt’ which translates as ‘Kaza Mshipi’. It’s what Kenyans have been
told to do in light of inflation, taxation, and in some cases, even starvation.
Munene never
actually studied fine art in college, apart from the online courses he’s taken
on YouTube. Otherwise, he was on his way to becoming a computer systems analyst
while getting his first degree from Kenya Methodist University. He can’t say
what exactly happened for him to take a turn about face and decide to study
art.
“It was my
mother who kept recommending that I go into the arts,” Munene says. So he dug in.
He had already been going around to see art exhibition and got really good
advice from Michael Musyoka at Brush tu Artist Collective. He also attended
numerous workshops organized locally. That included one for refugee artists
which is where he began to see how profound and complex is the problem of
migration is, especially when someone has to flee their country to save their
life.
It was from
his work with refugee artists that he was invited to University of Manchester
to talk about migration and the incentive it has given him to create a work
like ‘Misplaced Reality’. It was about
people coming to and going from our region, specifically Kenya. Both sides
encounter barriers to their entrance as well as their exit.
“It’s ironic
that while many Africans want to go abroad for better education, better health
care, better job prospects; meanwhile, Europeans (and now Chinese) are looking
for ways to come into the country and stay,” he adds
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