In Phase I, Engaging Entrapment, I explored my mental entrapment with Kenya’s colonial past in relationship with my father and siblings. My father (b. 1936) struggled with growing up under colonial circumstances and the contrasts he faced living in Germany for twenty years, returning to his homeland in 1978. His struggles with his own multiple identities are issues his children also face. I was confronting the internal cage within me through my personal experiences from childhood.

The installation which housed the performance was constructed with barbed wire and a vinyl collage of protectorate maps of East Africa between 1950 and 1952, beach sand, red wool, broken mirror pieces and three figures in the foetal position: symbolizing myself and my siblings. In a private performance, I engaged with the three figures and take down the installation structure. I removed myself and my siblings from the “entrapment” breaking down the fragmented hanging mirrors in a symbolic gesture confronting our collective history and it’s effects on our identity. During the last phase of the project titled Release, located along the Indian Ocean on Bofa beach, I cremated the three figures sending them out to sea on small wooden rafts. I found it important to fully liberate the figures, to be able to go beyond the colonial history, beyond my personal history.

“Together they represent the key categories which constructed the colonial image of Kenya to a British public keen to be simultaneously horrified, seduced, and vindicated. On the one hand, these consist of ethnographic ‘types’, missionary propaganda, official images from British royal tours, or colonial atrocities perpetrated under British colonial rule…On the other hand, images from a newly independent Kenya, of presidential social functions and official troops inspections produce another kind of fiction. The colonial archive and its successor’s meaning are transformed through Kyambi’s reconfigured combinations… Kyambi has intentionally segued interruptions to the official accounts presented through familiar public genres by inserting scenes of private domesticity in unexpected context…Deliberately mixing together images from such different categories produces a tension which serves to shift the monolithic character of most commemorative sculpture.”

Annie Coombes Coombes, Annie, Lotte Hughes, Karega-Munene. Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya. I.B. Tauris. 2014

The images used in this permanent photographic installation were scanned from the Nairobi National Museum’s archive department. I sourced through the records going as far back as 1898 till current times. Images in the piece were used to combine normal everyday life with political figures and monumental moments in Kenya’s history.

It was important for me that the viewer sees several images at once. Looking at photography from the camera mans point of view – the idea that we never really see the whole picture, just flashes of one person’s perspective. The octagon shaped mirror of which these photographs hang also gives another dimension to the work, not only do viewers see themselves in this history but also the work becomes infinite, the past our constant reminder.

Photographs are close up details of the textures and political slogans captured on the streets of Oaxaca. The walls are slowly peeling their layers and revealing their past and present to the artist all at the same time.

“What Cultural Fabric?” is part of a project that started in Mexico City in 2009, which is still a work in progress. The piece looks at what cultural fabric Kenyan society has or is developing, if any. Researching Mexican history and its development of cultural identity and philosophy led me to ask why the representation of Kenyan culture is a Maasai shuka (blanket), why a whole country’s identity is represented and re-represented by the cloth of only one tribe out of more than forty-two.

My work starts from a very personal source, my mother’s shirt. The images are close-ups of this shirt. The shirt becomes a fabric and could easily be mistaken for a gunia (Hessian cloth). The guniastill permeates class and tribal divides. It symbolizes growth, referencing agriculture, construction and interior decorating industries among others. This series of photographs has developed further after being part of an installation I recently exhibited titled Fracture (i) (2008 – ongoing). These photographs have become a vehicle to ask several questions about identity and history: what is the meaning of this metaphor, this idea, of society having a cultural fabric? What are we building? What has already been built? By whom and what for?

Through history, mankind has always tried to increase his capacities, tools gave him extra strength, weapons gave him extra force, the engine allowed him to carry heavier things, but it’s the first time in humankind that we have devices which are not about the physical strength but about mental strength. In the postcolonial discourse, the key question is, who is in the fore in accessing tools of developing one’s mental strength? 

In the 21st century, are our old references to the industrial revolution still valid? What is deemed good, what is treated as a right, what is deemed wrong, where does the African contemporary go from here? References in these fast mutating societies are hard to find, and this is where Syowia’s work Fracture (i) is placing itself; addressing transformations in her society, where does one stand as a woman, as a human being? How do you adapt to the fast economic transformations and the social norms the economies bear? In Kenya and specifically the capital city, Nairobi, there is a narrow view of what it is to be successful. Generally, success is measured with materialism that stems from western capitalistic ideals.

This current construction includes a past value system based on a communal identity, the result often creating violent and vulnerable circumstances. Syowia uses her history to explain what is coming. Her work Fracture (i) has a reference to colonialism, references to transformation, and the contemporary situation. It navigates the society – the idea of what you should be or what you shouldn’t be, how you present yourself, how people assume you’re this or that. 

The sisal costume used at the beginning of the performative element in the work was developed using the traditional Kamba weaving method used for making kiondo’s , referencing to both traditional crafts as well as the colonial sisal plantations. The plantations enforced limitation on black Kenyans, taking away their right to establish financial security and therefore denying them power. In her performance, it was important for Syowia to have a covered head specifically during the destruction phase of stepping on the clay vessels, symbolic to the current state of dissolving Kenya’s heritage: the destruction of a life force.

The work references’ the artists lived experience, which the female body belongs to the community. The artist explores how the female body becomes part of other people’s norms and ideas of what should be.

Rose is a character I created for a previous performance installation titled, Fracture (i). In Rose’s Relocation, Rose struggles with coping in her current environment, Metz, a small town in France. The digital collages portray her in this town with superimposed images of her memories of her mother’s home. A series of five works are presented in a golden frame that is reminiscent of the kinds of frames that a middle-class Kenyan household might use to present images of their family members. As much as living overseas often is seen as a great accomplishment, it also often presents a great burden, and can provoke feelings of isolation and loss for many. In Kenya and specifically in the capital city, Nairobi, there is a narrow viewpoint on what it is to be successful. Generally, success is measured with materialism that stems from capitalistic ideals. This current construction includes a value system based on a communal identity, the result of which often creates violent and vulnerable circumstances.

These photographs are part of the docu­mentation of Kyambi’s performance explor­ing meditation as a highest form of emanci­pation. The eternal attempt to reach utopia where there would be no need for weapons or body armour for self-protection, through meditation finding an overarching space of acceptance.

The following text was part of a flyer in both German and English for the performance audience in Bremen. Whoever showed an interest or had a question was also given this by gallery assistants. Kyambi did not speak during the performance but addressed all questions at the artist talk the following day. 

“It is important to present my work to you in a public way, to do this walk between the Übersee-Museum, through Doms hof via the Böttcher street to the Bremen City Gallery connecting with the ground, interrupting our everyday movements in the hopes of creating a moment to ask you to think about our collective history, specifically Bremen’s history with Namibia and how the colonial condition is present in our lives yet not deeply explored in educational and social forums. My art often asks how we are personally contributing to situations and my work is demanding of the audience to see themselves in the ‘other’ and to recognize the struggle in this process. 

The dress I’m wearing is a national Herero Day dress worn in Namibia in commemoration of the Herero/ Namaqua genocide and those who fought for the rights of the Namibian people a country which gained its independence in 1990. The veil that follows the dress that I drag through the streets of Bremen include excerpts of letters and records from Chief Witbooi (c.1830 – 29 October 1905 one of nine national heroes of Namibia) and letters from German administrators engaging chiefs from different areas, constitutional resolutions, photographs from the Mohamed Amin Foundation of historical spaces in Namibia. History is a long and layered narrative, and my work is only a moment, a moment asking for reflection. My performative action is a highlighter, marking some narratives, instigating operations of repair, through acknowledgment, through the sharing of knowledge and through the act of being present.”

The images used in this permanent photographic installation were scanned from the Nairobi National Museum’s archive department. I sourced through the records going as far back as 1898 till current times. Images in the piece were used to combine normal everyday life with political figures and monumental moments in Kenya’s history.

It was important for me that the viewer sees several images at once. Looking at photography from the camera mans point of view – the idea that we never really see the whole picture, just flashes of one person’s perspective. The octagon shaped mirror of which these photographs hang also gives another dimension to the work, not only do viewers see themselves in this history but also the work becomes infinite, the past our constant reminder.

Kaspale is a character devised to intervene in spaces charged with colonial activities. As a playful trickster who engages in social critique and satire, Kaspale calls out authority when needed and speaks up when others can’t. Kaspale wears a Kaunda suit, a symbol of prestige and political resistance during the post-independence era, bearing also connotations of servitude in our contemporary times. Made from mosquito netting, which is both protective and permeable, the suit’s materiality evokes the ineffectual prevention of the colonizers’ penetration across the African continent. The character’s red finger paint, referencing ochre, generates the energy of power, traditionally used as UV and insect replant. The highlighted golden fingers, toes and mouth symbolize the speaker; holding the space for truth-telling. 

The mask Kaspale wears references a historic Makonde mask in the MARKK Museum collection, which was created by an artist in colonial Tanzania to embody mindimu, the ancestors. It is usually worn during a dance that accompanies the reintegration of initiates into society after transformative seclusion. Designed to build character and to raise awareness of the individual’s position in the community, the initiation also serves for instruction in questions of a good sense of community and intensive commitment within the social organisation. The mask’s appearance marks the end of the journey of refinement and perfecting, of creating a mature, socially fully integrated person. 

The vortex series connects to a deeper realm of the archive. No longer able to see the zoologists’ photographs, Kaspale’s intervention has led to a space of timelessness. Traveled through the archive and into the vortex, Kaspale exists in a realm not bound by time nor space, its here nor there, neither present nor past.