1983–present
Mimi Cherono Ng'ok
Mimi Cherono Ng'ok (b. 1983), a Kenyan photographer based in Nairobi, shoots in the countries where she has lived and travelled: Dakar, Accra, Berlin, Kigali, Kampala, Johannesburg. Trees, the tropics, horses and an unidentified male figure recur in her pictures. Her series “Everyone is Lonely in Kigali” won the Photo London Artproof Award in 2017, and her work has been shown at the Berlin Biennale and the Carnegie International.
Biography
The series “Everyone is Lonely in Kigali” was not made only in Kigali. Mimi Cherono Ng'ok shot it in Dakar, Accra, Berlin, Abidjan, Kampala, Kigali, Nairobi and Johannesburg, and it is hardly tied to any one place. That, to my mind, is her method: the city is a pretext, and what she photographs is a state of mind.
Ng'ok grew up on the rural outskirts of Nairobi. She went to university in Cape Town: in 2006 she graduated with a BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
Her first notable work dates from 2008. The series “I Am Home” is about African immigrants in South Africa and deals with home, displacement, loss and identity. In 2011 her testimony was included in “Voices: a Compilation of Testimonials”, a collection of accounts by African artists living and working in Cape Town and its surroundings, edited by Rucera Seethal. In 2013, together with Thabiso Sekgala and Musa Nxumalo, Ng'ok produced the book “Peregrinate: Field Notes on Time Travel and Space”, published by the Goethe-Institut in South Africa. In 2015 an exhibition of the same name by the three of them was held at the gallery of Makerere University in Kampala. In 2013 she also began a project made in the countries where she had lived and spent time. Alexandra Genova of Time described it as a series of vignettes on memory, loss and desire. Ng'ok believes that home is not a place but a state of mind, and Genova wrote that the work explores this temporality through the intersection of people and place. Diane Smyth, reviewing the exhibition “Africa State of Mind” in the British Journal of Photography, noted that in Ng'ok's work a personal interpretation of place stands against the apparent objectivity of the documentary lens. The photographer herself calls her pictures a visual diary of the experiences and emotions that come from an itinerant life.
The series “Do You Miss Me? Sometimes, Not Always” was made over about six months after October 2014 in Kigali, Abidjan, Kampala and Nairobi. It is dedicated to the memory of her friend Thabiso Sekgala, who died. In 2015 the series was included in the African Photography Encounters in Bamako, Mali.
In 2017 “Everyone is Lonely in Kigali” won the Photo London Artproof Award, and Ng'ok received a grant from the Magnum Foundation Fund. The following year brought three exhibitions at once: the Berlin Biennale (shown at the Academy of Arts), the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and “Africa State of Mind” at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham.
In 2019 the Hayward Gallery in London held “S'thandwa Sami” (“My Beloved”), with work by Ng'ok and Sekgala. As of April 2021 the Walther Collection holds 30 of her prints. She lives and works in Nairobi.
Profile notes