Miriam Syowia Kyambi

Biography

The first version of the performance “Fracture I” was shown on 29 April 2011 at the opening of the Poikilo Kouvola Art Museum in the Finnish town of Kouvola, and it lasted about an hour. Kyambi broke clay pots with red paint inside them. Afterwards, by her own account, she walked in circles outside her studio and left red footprints, and these marks interested her more than the performance itself. The photographic series “Moments (I)” came out of them.

She was born on 23 September 1979 in Nairobi, to a Kenyan father and a German mother, and grew up in Kenya. At eighteen she left for the United States and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2002. In 2003 she returned to Kenya. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Transart Institute at the University of Plymouth in 2020.

Her materials are clay, sisal, paint, photography, sound and video, and performance over all of it. She is concerned with memory and perception, and asks how modern human experience is shaped by constructed history, past and present violence, colonialism, family and sexuality. Many of her works begin with objects and documents. For “Infinity: Flashes of the Past” (from 2007) she scanned photographs in the archive of the National Museum of Kenya, dating from 1898 to the present, and combined ordinary life with political figures and notable moments in Kenyan history. For “Portals (I): Houses of the Present Past” (2010) she visited Fort Jesus in Mombasa, the Kilifi sisal plantation, the Karen Blixen Museum in Nairobi and the railway line from Nairobi to Mombasa, and then made a work from earthenware, sisal rope, hessian cloth and Christmas lights. It was shown at the My World Images Festival in 2010. In 2009 two months in Mexico City produced “Permiso”: the installation “Permiso: Peep Box” and the photographic series “Permiso: Excuse Me”. There she watched people and noticed that a gesture reads differently in a different context. In her view, the presentation of an artwork works in the same way. That same year her solo exhibition “Cross Cultural Connection” was held in Mexico City. For the 2010 photographs “What Cultural Fabric?” she used close-ups of her mother’s shirt: the fabric in the pictures can be mistaken for hessian.

In 2012, with a Wellcome Collection grant, she took part in the Art in Global Health residency at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). With James Muriuki she made the photographic series “Gloves II” and the work “Infinite Consciousness”. They were interested in sterile gloves, which protect and at the same time form a barrier, and in the relationship between health researchers and the participants in their studies. The gloves were thrown into the air and photographed against the light.

“Between Us” (2014) combines performance, installation, photography and video. With the artist and choreographer James Mweu and dancers of the Kunja Dance Theatre, she worked on material about the body, gender and social perception. The performances ran for four weeks, and the last took place on 5 July 2014. The work was shown at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi.

Kyambi’s work has been shown in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Senegal, Sweden, France, South Africa, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States and Zimbabwe. Group exhibitions include “ARS 11” in Kouvola (2011), “Layers” at the Nairobi National Museum (2012), “Foreign Bodies, Common Ground” at the Wellcome Collection in London (2013–2014) and “Ven är staden? Who is the city?” at the Center for Architecture and Design in Stockholm (2013–2014). Solo shows include “Gender, Power & the Past” at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi (2008) and “Kaspale” at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI, 2023).

Her work is in the collections of Robert Devereux in London, the Kouvola Art Museum, the National Museum of Kenya, NCAI and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation.