Ties That Bind, currently on view at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi, is an evocative and layered showcase that leans more toward conceptual and process-driven work than overt visual spectacle.
Curated as the culmination of the Sasa Nairobi Fellowship, the exhibition brings together five artists - Sammy Mutinda, Wallace Juma, John Lukhovi, Sachy Atieno, and Precious Narotso - all of whom undertook a year-long residency intended to bridge theory and practice through research-based artistic engagement. The result is a body of work that is reflective, experimental, and emotionally resonant.
Wallace Juma, formerly a painter now working in sculpture and installation, presents a compelling sound-based piece rooted in his field research around Lake Victoria.
'Formations (I)' by Wallace Juma, displayed at the Ties That Bind exhibition, Goethe-Institut Nairobi, May 6, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
At the heart of his installation is an audio loop embedded within conch shells, suspended in a fishing net at the gallery’s centre. Layered with ambient wind and fragmented conversations with lakeside communities, the piece evokes the chaotic rhythm of the lake’s shores.
Juma’s accompanying sculptural works - constructed from plastic resin, soil, found objects, and glass - navigate the fraught relationship between ecological abundance and environmental degradation.
His Basin installation, featuring a bed and chair assembled from shoreline detritus, glimmers with lightplay and layered symbolism. It is both a tactile and metaphysical exploration of the lake’s submerged narratives - its mythologies, scientific curiosities, and fragile beauty.
John’s loss and memory
John Lukhovi (incorrectly referred to as “Joel” in the original text) works with analogue photography to question the fragility of memory and the constructed nature of identity.
'Now you see (I)' art by Joel Lukhovi, displayed at the Ties That Bind exhibition, Goethe-Institut in Nairobi on May 6, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
His use of damaged family photos - displayed as fragments of lost narratives - calls attention to the vulnerability of personal archives. His central provocation, 'What if images die?' lingers beyond the frame.
Lukhovi’s critique is both technological and existential, inviting reflection on how identity persists - or dissolves - in the absence of visual documentation.
Sachy ’s testimony of labour
In Fabric of Resilience, Sachy Atieno deploys fabric as both medium and message. Her assemblages of leso textiles, sisal sacks, and plastic bags weave together narratives of women’s labour, colonial and post-industrial histories, and cultural identity.
'Fabric of Resilience' by Sachy Atieno, displayed at the Ties That Bind exhibition, Goethe-Institut in Nairobi on May 6, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
The work’s formal subtlety belies its conceptual strength: the material choices function as metaphors for resilience, erasure, and unrecognised contributions of women to nation-building.
Atieno’s manipulation of print, texture, and layering gives voice to a collective lament — a quiet protest against the marginalisation of female labour. Her practice reads as both homage and critique, balancing poetic nuance with political urgency.
Precious’ aesthetics of absence
Perhaps the most emotionally raw of the exhibition’s offerings, Precious Narotso’s work excavates personal grief through minimalist installation and digital media.
Drawing from her experience of abandonment by her father, she constructs a sparse, melancholic domesticity, watering dead flowers becomes a central visual motif for mourning the living.
Her decision to drain colour from her usually vibrant visual language, including animations displayed on an antique television, is deliberate. The resulting monochrome aesthetic, filtered through the lens of childhood memory and trauma, creates a compelling juxtaposition between innocence and emotional decay. Narotso’s work is a haunting meditation on absence, nostalgia, and fractured familial bonds.
Sammy’s emotional duality
Sammy Mutinda’s work bridges traditional printmaking with contemporary abstraction. His large hand-carved woodcut plates are densely layered with gestural markings and form-bending textures.
'Light and Voices of Creation' by Sammy Mutinda, displayed at the Ties That Bind exhibition, Goethe-Institut in Nairobi on May 6, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
Mutinda’s practice is concerned with emotional duality - the internal and external self, the private and the projected. His abstract compositions operate as visual meditations, charting psychic landscapes and relational tensions.
Ties That Bind succeeds not through spectacle but through intimacy, intellectual rigour, and emotional resonance. These artists, each in their own right, interrogate the personal and political through varied media and methodologies. What binds them is not a common aesthetic but a commitment to excavation — of memory, material, history, and the self.
The exhibition offers an important contribution to Nairobi’s contemporary art landscape, serving both as a culmination of the Sasa Fellowship and a compelling provocation toward deeper dialogue between theory, practice, and audience.
