Kuambelelia ( Starting a conversation).
This body of painting are meant to evoke an open conversation so as to confront the tension between our recent shared colonial experience propagated by our binary education system and the discontinuity of it as presented in our daily psycho social dramas. They seek to address the power of a ubiquitous abstract symbolic world over our daily personal dramatic experience by employing iconic images such as the upended chair, the cow, a red square and a box over the head inquiring about what role the dichotomy presented by our present way of acquiring knowledge about the world around us plays in conditioning our outlook in a post-colonial world.
Once again, the artist is drawing upon conversations with his grandmother in a painful memory exercise clearly meant to recall who he is in a world bereft of a cultural archive. The work is questioning the meaning of devices that have replaced the archival objects of his grandmother’s era. When she narrates to the artist about ‘kana kayua’, a time of great hunger which occurred during her childhood, it seems she is talking about a period of hunger for and loss of knowledge; a disappearance of archival objects which are now being replaced by devices represented by screens connected through wires.
These works contain a sense of protest against the patriarchal brand arising from the colonial period and questions its relevance is a postcolonial worldview. “Being a man”, “Deception”, ” Man worship” are some of the phrases
Scrawled on some of the work, where the human and animal figures are suspended all the time in an unframed white space. Tensions created by the conversation between people, animals and abstract forms in the work is meant to provoke the sense of being a man in the world.