Kipya Ki? - Meet the Collaborating Artists

Kipya Ki? - Meet the Collaborating Artists

FOTEA in collaboration with FORMAT, are pleased to announce the artists collaborating on the ‘Kipya Ki?’ project as selected by our curators Trevor Mukholi (UG) and Ibrahim Azab (UK).

Trevor and Ibrahim are curating the work of ten visual lens-based artists working with emerging forms of photography from East Africa and the UK to produce an immersive online multiplayer exhibition, focused on showcasing emerging ideas and visions within contemporary photography, presented online at New Art City

Ibrahim, “I think what’s special about this is that there aren’t many ‘boundaries’, something art has to offer to everyone, thinking space and time to invite people to consider  abstract and critical ideas. 

The selected artists work with photographic, digital and physical materials through mediums such as sculpture, CGI, moving image and sound. Revolving around multi media practices, within and out of studio environments and experimenting in ways of intervening, changing and altering used and new image material. These artists display a unique ability to transform and navigate through unfamiliar territory, pushing the visual medium to encompass contemporary issues and concepts within social, political, industrial, technological and economical landscapes.”

Trevor, “Through digital media, the miracle of image-making has been proliferated so much that the core basics of become a second subconscious (the repeated observation of the act of storing visual histories as images become so common-place that it is now no longer observed, it fades into the millions of things that constitute a reality), upon which then other images can infer coded messages, this need for the image to be coded and complex defines what’s new in image-making. The artists I am showing in this exhibition are now creating codes and personal symbols through how they play with photographic elements, and they portray through these images agency and personhood.”

Together, the curators along with the collaborating lens-based artists will work in the New Art City space, exploring different ways, forms and modes of expression within the platform to share their work to new audiences. New Art City is not trying to recreate the exhibition or gallery spaces as we know it but rather create a new space for interacting with art that does not have the same constraints and/or rules which makes it exciting. 

The exhibition is set to open on 8 April with a launch event taking place online within New Art City on 7 April. More information to be announced.

Here are the artists chosen for this endeavour:

Kipya Ki? - Meet the Collaborating Artists

Sherie Margaret Ngigi (KE); is a passionate visual artist, photographer and filmmaker who always draws inspiration from the environment around her. By taking images of women, she makes an image of herself and tries to shed light on issues affecting the women in her society. This is of great importance to her. 

Felicity Hammond (UK); a multi-discipline artist fascinated by ideological contradictions within the urban and political landscapes. Hammond employs crisp and occasionally cyanotype techniques, catalogs construction sites and obsolete built environments, transforming each landscape into a lush and troubling tableau that recalls the meticulous composition of still life paintings.

Brook Getachew (ET); a lens-based visual artist whose work is a meditative question on existence as he uses his experience as a mirror for others to pause and experience theirs. He lets his encounters and experiences inform his work. Spontaneous, unintentional expressions pave the way for discovery of truth. He takes an experimental, almost impulsive yet controlled, and reserved approach to my work.

Elise Wootten (UK); a recent graduate and artist whose work sits between collage and assemblage, using abstract shapes and cut-out images which form multi-perspective works. Wooten plays with concepts and ideas surrounding realism, representation and memory through shapes, flatness and still life photography.

Maria Ahmed (UK); a digital collage artist whose work invites us to search within a labyrinth of databases, web images and book materials that are collected from online and library sources, later to be assembled as an immersive constellation of collaged, moving and still images  that surround the observer.

Duncan Poulton (UK); a collage and web based artist residing between Birmingham and London, UK. His practice is fed by an obsessive gathering of online content into a vast digital archive, recombined into still and moving image collages. Made exclusively with found materials, his work addresses a visual culture of overabundance and ambivalence, exploring the compression of histories and meaning engendered by the internet.

Carol Kagezi (UG); a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the evolving self. Through her visual works, she uses collage to interrogate the complexities of black Africanness, Oneness, and Order. This body of work is a product of her quest to find her identity.

Canon Griffin (UG); a Ugandan artist who holds art in the highest undeniable regard as the most unbridled way of sharing the experience and aspiration of our being. He’s motivated by the mysteriousness of our presence, all the possibilities!

Lidiya Zelke (ET); a mixed media Artist from Addis Ababa Ethiopia who has been working on different organizations as a creative director and graphics designer. Her works usually tell a story of inner feelings, how they reveal and create layers of our every excitement, sense of anticipation , loneliness and how it cracks and polish us throughout our journey of life by changing us irreversibly without even sensing it.

Tom Faber (UK); a digital artist whose work focuses on memory, place, and transformation. He produces both videos and digitally constructed images, using a blend of techniques from drawing, painting, collage and 3D animation.

Kipya Ki? Is supported by the British Council Cultural Exchange programme, which supportscultural organisations, festivals, artists, and creatives between the countries of Sub Saharan Africa and the UK to create art, build networks, collaborate and develop markets and share artists’ work with audiences.  

#EastAfricaArts #SouthernAfricaArts

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