Drawing on themes of social justice, environmental degradation, and the inequality that so often underpins both, Kenyan artist Mbugua Kimani’s prints translate complex topics into deceptively simple images. Nuance is woven into each work, as much a part of its architecture as the figures and patterns that populate it.
His series Sex for Fish, for instance, addresses the relationships between local women and fishermen in Western Kenya, wherein sex is exchanged for the day’s catch. Faces, at once beguiling and beseeching, flecked with scales or composed of fins and tails, meet the viewer’s gaze – leaving them to wonder whether Kimani is depicting the women buying fish, the men selling it, or the factors that give rise to the economy in the first place.
Kimani’s Fractured Earth series is similarly purposeful, encompassing themes of climate disaster and people’s impact on the natural world. Focusing on humans’ symbiotic relationship with their environment, Kimani’s knowing surrealism both intensifies and abstracts his underlying message: we are all part of the system we inhabit, just as capable of nurture as we are of destruction. Whichever we choose, we’ll be its ultimate recipients.
Pulsing through Kimani’s practice is his interest in identity: that of others, and his own. Fashioned from external forces and internal currents, it is the counterintuitive ambiguity of his figures that allows the artist to insinuate himself into every tableau; ditto his specific subject; ditto his viewer. As such, each composition performs that most quotidian of magic tricks, wherein the most exacting details deliver universalising depictions of us all.