Sebawali Sio is a Kenyan Born visual artist whose work primarily deals with the exploration of sexual, physical and emotional abuse of women. Her Art regularly stems from her feelings communicated through painting and sculpting. ‘Eyes’ and ‘women’ feature a lot in her work. She deems eyes important both as a means of communicating emotion and as organs of great significance where Visual Art is concerned. Her paintings are thus cycles in terms of both the observer and the observed. Women in her work are a form of self-portraits in a manner to suggests a shared identity as if all women could be her.
She is a member of the Brushtu collective artists space in Buruburu, as well as Karen Village. Her works have been collected by individuals, both locally and internationally and corporates such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers. She has worked closely with Paul Onditi and Onyis Martin and is currently learning Glass art from Tonney Mugo. She has had four exhibitions in Nairobi, one in Village Market in 2006, two at the shift eye gallery (2014 and 2017) The 2017 show was curated by Sunny Dolat, a group show at Brushtu as well as One Off Gallery.
Her work has been heavily influenced by her exposure and several exhibitions she has attended in Lagos, Kampala, Kigali, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Geneva and Montreaux and most importantly Nairobi.
Syowia Kyambi is an interdisciplinary artist and curator whose media spans photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture and performance installation. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). Syowia is based in Nairobi and of Kenyan/German origin.
Her works include a permanent commission ‘Infinity: Flashes of the Past’ for the Nairobi National Museum (2007), and an ephemeral performance installation ‘What’s Wrong Dear Jane’ for the Kenyan Art Fair (2014). She is the recipient of the Centre for Art Design & Social Research fellowship (2018-2020 cycle), the UniArts Helsinki fellowship (2018), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2017) and the Art in Global Health grant from the Wellcome Trust Fund in the United Kingdom (2013). Artist residencies include PRAKSIS, Norway (2019), CAD+SR Italy & Mexico (2018), HIAP, Finland (2018), Delfina Foundation, UK (2016) and IASPIS, Sweden (2013).
In her curatorial work she has collaborated with Ostrale Centre for Contemporary Art Biennale, Dresden, Germany (2019, 2016) and Goethe-Institute, Kenya (2012, 2010) as well as working with collectives and individual artists in East Africa. Her work is held in a number of private and public collections including the Robert Devereux Collection, London, the Kouvola Art Museum Collection, Finland, and the Nairobi National Museum, Kenya and with the Sindika Dokolo Foundation.
Andrew W. Ngurumi, LL.B, LL.M is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, practising in areas of Art law and Intellectual Property. He holds, A Certificate on Human Rights, Cultural Rights and Artist Rights from Artwatch Africa Response-Training Workshops offered by Arterial Network through its Artwatch Africa Project in partnership with the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa(IHRDA); A Certificate in CopyrightX offered under the auspices of Harvard Law School, the HarvardX distance-learning initiative, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society; and A Certificate on the Murumbi African Heritage Collections from the Murumbi Trust and The National Museums of Kenya.
"No longer putting society at the service of art and much less at the service of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of the society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable and at the service of all those who cry for the vindication through the spirit of their human condition and raising up of their dignity."
Maestro José Antonio Abreu
Dennis Muraguri (b. 1980, Naivasha, Kenya) is a Nairobi-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of printmaking, sculpture, video and installation in varying combinations.
Muraguri has been gaining recognition for his imagery of matatus – privately owned vans and mini-buses that are the main mode of public transportation in Kenya - and the culture that has developed around them in his work. Muraguri's woodcut prints reference both Nairobi’s urban culture and international popular culture using graffiti, music and politics depicted on these real-life matatus.
Muraguri received a Diploma in Painting and Art History from the Buruburu Institute of Fine Art (2015), and has been a resident artist at the Kuona Artists’ Collective (formerly the Kuona Trust Art Centre) since 2005.
He has exhibited extensively in Nairobi, including a solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery, 2016, Jua Kali, 2014, a collaborative installation with Tahir Karmali and Tonney Mugo which went on to be included in Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design at the Vitra Design Museum. He has participated in international art fairs such as 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair, London, 2016, and the Jo’burg Art Fair, 2016. Muraguri was also one of the participating artists in the 2014 edition of the KLA Public Art Festival, in Kampala, Uganda and will be the artist in residence at Espaço Luanda Arte, in Luanda, Angola in 2019.
Cyrus Kabiru was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where he still lives and works. He has exhibited frequently both internationally and on the African continent. Notable solo exhibitions include: Upcoming in 2010 at the Kuona Trust in Nairobi, Kenya; Cyrus Kabiru at the Kunstpodium T Gallery in Tilburg, Netherlands in 2011 and C-Stunners & Black Mamba at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town in 2015. He was recently selected as one of Quartz’s Africa Innovators for 2016 in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2013, he was a fellow at TED’s The Young, The Gifted, The Undiscovered in the USA. That same year, Kabiru exhibited at the Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria and his work formed part of Afrofuture: Adventure with Makers, Thinkers and Dreamers at the Milan Design Week in Italy, as well as in The Shadows Took Shape at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA.
Kabiru‘s work was included in the seminal travelling exhibition Making Africa – A Continent of Contemporary Design, curated by Amelie Klein with Okwui Enwezor, first shown at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany in 2015, and later at The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and then at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Spain during 2016. The exhibition was most recently shown at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands. Kabiru also featured in AFRICA – Architecture & Identity at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark and Beyond Borders, the 5th edition of the Beaufort Triennial in West Flanders, Belgium, both in 2015.
Important group exhibitions include: Concealed Selections from the Permanent Collection at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; Towards Intersections: Negotiating Subjects, Objects and Contexts at the University of South Africa Art Gallery in Pretoria, South Africa and Lumières d’Afriques, organised by the AAD Fund, at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, France during 2015.
In 2016, Kabiru was the resident artist at the Han Nefkens Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, where he was also the first artist to participate in the Flow Series talks programme – a joint initiative of the Han Nefkens Foundation and the Antoni Tàpies Foundation. Also in 2016, Kabiru was selected as a featured artist for The ARMORY Show’s Focus Section, African Perspectives, curated by Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, in New York, USA. His work featured in Brutal Beauty: Violence and Contemporary Design at the MARTA Herford Museum of Contemporary Art in Herford, Germany; Unorthodox, curated by Jens Hoffmann, at The Jewish Museum in New York, USA; and the Climactic: Post Normal Design exhibition at The Carnegie Mellon University School of Design in Pittsburgh, USA.
Cyrus Kabiru was featured in the Gestalten publication titled Africa Rising: Fashion, Design and Lifestyle from Africa. Notable collections include the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in South Africa; the Han Nefkens H+F Foundation in Netherlands; the Lemaître Collection in France and Studio Museum Harlem in USA.
Michael Musyoka was born in 1986 and raised in Nairobi. He grew to appreciate graffiti on commuter buses and walls of business premises around his neighborhood. This laid the ground work for his approach to figurative compositions before enrolling into Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts in 2009. These skills would later in life secure him jobs as an illustrator in publishing companies and advertising agencies in Nairobi.
In 2013 he founded Brush Tu Art Studio, an artist collective in Nairobi, alongside two other artists who he would collaborate with on various artistic projects including mural painting and mentoring younger artists. This also marked his entry into professional practice which has seen him exhibiting widely locally and abroad.
He was awarded 2nd prize in the professional artist category of Manjano Art Competition in 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya.
Michael lives and works in Nairobi.
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