Exhibition: Remains, Waste & Metonymy III – KIKULACHO, Sept. 3-30 2018 @ National Museums of Kenya


Dates: September 3-30, 2018
Venue: National Museums of Kenya
Launch: September 6, 2018 at 6.00pm

About
Kikulacho Nairobi brings together a diversity of thinkers, artists and cultural producers in an artistic process which seeks to absorb, engage with and reflect upon people’s complex relationships with, and experiences of, food and the ‘stuff’ of food. This project follows on from the success of Remains, Waste and Metonymy in 2015/16, and Remains, Waste and Metonymy II: Sensing Nairobi in 2017.
Food, and the nourishment it provides is vital in multiple and diverse ways; and it becomes central to people’s everyday experiences. Our relationship with and experience of food, its associated practices and the ‘stuff’ of food, is intriguingly complex, diverse, and ephemeral.
Kikulacho Nairobi explores the ways that food – in all its diversity of material forms, practices, meanings, symbolic association and values – has, and continues, to form, and give shape to multiple, contradictory, sensorial experiences of and insights into urban living.
Using this as our central unifying theme, Remains, Waste and Metonymy III: Kikulacho Nairobi considers the ephemeral and material significance of food; the multiple functions and interplay between food, performance, ritual and identity; the spaces for food’s production, distribution and consumption; and the multiplicity of physical, social and political networks and relations in which food is embedded…

Remains, Waste and Metonymy

Remains, Waste & Metonymy: A Critical Intervention into Art/Scholarship, Jan. 18 – Feb. 18 2016 @ National Museums of Kenya

Remains, Waste and Metonymy
Remains, Waste and Metonymy: A critical intervention into art/scholarship. Curated by Neo Musangi and Joost Fontein.

Opening: January 22, 2016 from 6 pm

Dates: 18 January – 18 February 2016
Venue: National Museums of Kenya, Museum Hill Road
Entry: Museums Rates Apply

About
This exhibition carries the remnants of an event held at the BIEA in Nairobi on 24th October 2015, entitled Remains, Waste and Metonymy: A critical intervention into art/scholarship. That event sought to provoke new avenues of collaboration between artists, scholars and other cultural producers around the themes of waste, remains and metonymy.

The unifying question bringing the interventions traced here together is how an approach to stuff as incomplete, open-ended and emergent can offer critical scrutiny to the assumed finality, stability and comfort of ‘objects’, ‘persons’ and landscapes. Always ‘in the making’ remains and waste often appear like unfinished biographies, metaphors, symbols or narrations that promise but rarely deliver entirely coherent meanings, bounded entities and stable wholes. Their indeterminacy can be creatively explored to reveal the excessive multiplicities of time, substance and space.

In exhibiting the remnants of these interventions here, we seek to reflect on how the traces of events outlive their particular moments, mirroring how our approach emphasizes process than product, emergence rather than finality, the subjunctive rather than the conditional, and the possible rather than the certain. In bringing together a diversity of critical intellectualisms we seek to provoke longer explorations of the uneasy yet creative analytical space between scholarship and the arts around the themes of materiality and temporality.

Sponsored by British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA)