Kaloki Nyamai’s practice threads together personal memory, intergenerational learnings, and the socio-political tensions that shape contemporary East Africa, in particular his home region of Kitui, Kenya. Nyamai often cites the storytelling of his grandmother and the skill of his mother, a textile artist, as inroads into his Kamba heritage. These influences are evident in the tactile grammar of his canvases assembled from rope, sisal, newspaper, fabric, photographic transfers and yarn. Through layering, stitching and excision, Nyamai creates scenes that often evoke tender domestic scenarios.
Nyamai’s compositions do not document events per se; they register after-effects. Figures remain partially formed, hovering on the edge of abstraction. This instability mirrors emotional states: grief that does not resolve, hope that must be renewed, belonging that is constantly reworked and renegotiated. Nyamai’s work reclaims space for the quiet, unresolved dimensions of black experience often overshadowed by spectacle or simplification. Recently, he has engaged more frequently with Kenyan political life, particularly its lingering cycles of state violence, though in an allegorical way, speaking to deeper processes and rituals of rupture and repair. The stitch becomes a metaphor not only of mending but also of holding together contradictions: beauty and brutality, memory and forgetting, harm and hope.
—Renée Akitelek Mboya
