Kenyan artist Kaloki Nyamai’s assemblage paintings offer a navigation system of Akamba heritage—familial wisdom shared in the mother tongue—while also transmitting experiences of civic strife, political failures, police brutality and mass movements in Kenya and beyond. In large-scale canvases that expand on the character of painting, Nyamai layers newsprint, embeds found documents and inserts heavy stitching, relaying not only contexts of shared labour, historical scars and contemporary wounds but also encounters in healing. Titled in Kikamba, Nyamai’s ancestral language, Nekusyanginya nivike I and II, TUKWATANE KIMWE, Kwata and TWETELA VAA NGINYA ENDEE (all 2024) unveil a coded relation between self and world, braiding facets of harmony and chaos through painterly mass, characters in flux, communal dreaming and the swell of aspiration. They present global locations where renewal and restorative actions can take shape, foregrounding hope in the face of political cataclysm and youth resistance. Watch this Artist In Focus to explore how these works face forward in anticipation of a new dawn. 

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