ART
NARRATING CONFLICT FROM GRAVITART AT KOBO TRUST
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 14 April 2018)
GravitArt is
mainly an online gallery that occasionally mounts pop-up exhibitions. And when it
does, those shows are invariably thought-provoking and extra- ordinary.
‘Conflicts
in the Narrative’ which opened last Friday night at Kobo Trust is no exception.
Veronica Paradinas Duro has stamped her own iteration on the works of a dozen
East African artists, most of whom are Kenyan. The rest come from either Sudan
or Ethiopia.
El Tayeb with his 'Man vs Man' mixed media paintings on wood at Kobo Trust
All twelve come
from very different backgrounds, create works that are also diverse. The one
thing they have in common is the taste of Veronica who as founder and curator
of GravitArt, designed the concept and construction of the show.
The
conflicts, of course, are all man-made: man against self, against man, man
against nature, against technology and against society at large.
Her
construction is a fascinating one. But what she seems to assume is that visual art,
be it a painting, print, sculpture or installation invariably contains a
narrative and has a story to tell.
What we
understand is that not all art has that much intrinsic meaning. It may have
been created simply to be ‘art for art’s sake’, art as a decorative work, or
art as a commodity to sell.
Veronica
resolves this issue, however. For as the show’s curator, she can attribute
whatever narrative she wishes to the paintings, sculptures or installations
that she’s included in her show.
Onyis Martin's 'Theory of Space' in ink, acquired door and archival paper at Kobo Trust
Thus, Peter
Elungat may not have been thinking about the conflict between man and nature
when he painted his [Ms1] ‘Mushroom,
Me and Red’. But it’s a work that definitely arrests you as you walk into
Kobo’s vast gallery space. It compels you to ask, when Elungat did take this
radical turn away from his former figurative style and towards a more dramatic
semi-abstract form of expression?
Veronica
chose Elungat’s piece to be in the exhibition after he’d completed the work.
That was the case for virtually all 24 works in the show. So one can
congratulate the Spanish artist-architect for her keen curatorial skill. She’s
went all around Nairobi and outside the country as well to find artworks that
she felt fit into her vision as well as into the narratives that she attributes
to the works.
For
instance, selecting Dennis Muraguri’s seven foot tall ‘Guzzler Flow’ and
placing it in the ‘man versus technology’ wing of the show makes a lot of
sense. The artist assembled a wide array of mechanical parts to create a form
that definitely looks cyborg, meaning partly human and partly machine-like.
Similarly, Lemok
Tompoika actually uses technology to create ‘Of Gods I & III’. He does so
by combining digital art with painting to produce zombie-like characters.
It was also
ingenious for Veronica to place Kevin Oduor’s two-piece ‘Existence’ sculpture
in the ‘man versus self’ side of the show since the work seems very personal.
It’s almost like a semi-abstract self-portrait since the artist, like the
sculpture is missing a limb. Yet the artwork has ‘Existence’ just as the artist
himself clearly does.
The
Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele also has a physical challenge, so one
appreciates why his beautifully colored abstract artworks feature next to
Kevin’s and are classified under ‘man versus self’.
The other
painting that is well-placed, in the ‘man versus society’ group is Shabu
Mwangi’s ‘Immigrants’. Shabu has previously created a whole series of works on
the social issue (or ‘narrative’) of immigrants, so that’s a perfect fit.
One might
not say the same for Paul Onditi’s paintings. They feature Smokey, his
alienated ‘everyman’ who often appears in his art, usually adrift, floating
above a blurred landscape that looks to me less like nature and more like urban
morass.
But there’s
no need to quibble. Art is all about subjective interpretation: the curator
sees the landscape reflecting ‘man (meaning Smokey) versus nature’ which serves
her narrative and ultimately her show.
Finally, Veronica shapes the narrative of
artworks by Eltayeb Dawelbait and Onyis Martin as being reflective of ‘man
versus man.’ It works insofar as both artists created images of men: Eltayeb’s
as profiles, Onyis’s as men in motion. Both could just as easily be classed as
man versus self. But Veronica’s approach is refined, effective and exquisitely
hung.
One needs to
get to Kobo to see the way GravitArt’s show infuses marvelous meaning into East
African art.
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