Posts in category: art exhibits

Exhibition Opening: January 23, 2014 at 7 pm
Venue: Goethe-Institut, Auditorium
Admission free

Exhibition dates: January 24 2014 February 21, 2014

About

Tunnel Vision n., 1. a medical condition in which peripheral vision is greatly restricted,
2. narrowness of viewpoint resulting from concentrating on a single idea, opinion, etc. (The Collins English Dictionary).

The exhibition series Sasa Nairobi is the basis of Goethe Institut Nairobi’s work in the field of contemporary art. The aim is to work with artists from Kenya that have an advanced and innovative approach and often commission them to produce a new work. Since 2008, GI has exhibited around 40 artists, the last being a solo show by William Wambugu.

GI continue’s this series with Jacob Barua whom many people might know as an excellent film-maker. But at the same time he is just as gifted in photography as in film-making.

The exhibition Tunnel Vision consists of photographs and a video installation and is actually his first solo exhibition ever in Kenya. It is traversing life, death and history as witnessed by the manhole covers of Nairobi and its subterranean innards.
The artist states about the exhibition: “It all happened unexpectedly. There I was, tumbling down a flight of stairs, hands fluttering, trying to get a grip on something, but there wasn’t anything. A flailing Icarus traversing space and time, briefly immune to Newton’s ponderous laws of gravity. The thud of my skull on a hard object brought my short-lived flight of lightness to an abrupt stop. Red raw liquid spewed from my head in a rivulet onto an unexplored, alien surface. What was this? Where was I? So was this how it was all to end? On a sewer cover, of all possible places? How undignified; how mundane; how un-heroic…”