Kaloki Nyamai

Biography

Kaloki Nyamai’s grandmother sang and told stories in the Akamba tradition, and his mother taught him to draw and paint. These two strands, oral memory and hands-on work with materials, later came together in his practice.

He was born in 1985 in Kitui, Kenya (no more precise date is available). He studied industrial design at the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts (BIFA) in Nairobi. For a time he worked in design and related creative industries, then moved fully into fine art: painting and installation allowed him to combine his experience with materials and a conversation about the history of Kenya. His design training proved useful later too, when he created spaces in Nairobi for emerging artists. His early works dealt with memory and the history of the Kamba people. He uses charcoal, rope, stitched yarn and burnt surfaces. Personal subjects stand beside public issues in his work, and to my mind this is his main device: private biography becomes a way of showing how far contemporary identity depends on social and political circumstances. He usually titles his works in Kikamba, bringing pre-colonial imagery and family stories into them.

For a time Nyamai worked between Kenya and the United Kingdom. In 2023 he settled in Kenya for good and opened his first artist residency, Kamene, named after his mother. Later he unveiled a new studio in the Karen district of Nairobi, built in collaboration with the architect David Adjaye (Adjaye Associates).

In 2019 he took part in the Ostrale Biennale in Dresden. In 2020, at the Stellenbosch Triennale, he showed the suspended installation “Your Comfort Is My Discomfort”, made of cow dung, sisal rope and suspended boxes; in it he addressed postcolonial hierarchy, race and economic power. At the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) the Kenyan Pavilion showed his series “Ila Nae Kana Taku” (“When I Was a Child Like You”): paintings and mixed media about memory, longing and personal histories, with layered textures, stitched elements and figurative motifs. In 2023 the exhibition “Dining in Chaos” was held at the Barbara Thumm gallery in Berlin. In 2024 he took part in “The True Size of Africa” in Völklingen, Germany, and showed “Twe Vaa” at James Cohan gallery in New York. For the 2025 Sharjah Biennial he made, on commission, the suspended installation “Kwambelelya na Kuminukilya” (“From Start to Finish”), dated 2024. In it he turns to the history of Africa, kinship and social structures, and the stitched elements stand for healing and the continuity of collective memory. In 2025 his exhibition “Ithokoo masuiluni” was held at the Norval Foundation in South Africa; a show at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover is planned for 2026.