Tabula Rasa, Peterson Kamwathi's first institutional solo exhibition in Kenya. It brings together a new and expansive body of work spanning drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and video — and offering a comprehensive view of how these different practices speak to and extend one another in Kamwathi's work.
In the works gathered here, Kamwathi assembles figures, monuments, maps, and everyday objects into composite pictorial spaces that collapse multiple locations and histories into a single frame. The spaces his figures inhabit are deliberately unstable — terrains built from fragments of the real world, spliced and layered to draw out the connections between historical events and processes that continue to shape the present. Political monuments appear displaced and inverted. Quotidian objects are made monumental through scale and repetition. The ground beneath the figures and objects, the spaces they occupy, are as active and loaded as the figures themselves.
The exhibition takes its premise from the philosophical notion of the blank slate — and from the question of who benefits from declaring something empty. To call a place uninhabited, a signal absent, a culture void, is never innocent. It is a refusal of sight, and it has a history. That history is also the history of interference — of how our understanding of social and political realities is distorted through spectacularisation, and through the elevation of certain perspectives at the expense of others. Against this, Kamwathi proposes a mode of looking that is cumulative rather than linear, and oriented toward systems rather than isolated events.​
Artist Biography​
In his practice, Peterson Kamwathi attends to various communal, social, economic and cultural stances within contemporary society. He explores physical presence, modes of behaviour, embedded symbolisms, latent meanings and forming identities that are present in, and can be deduced from human groupings, social customs and collective political/religious patterns.
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Kamwathi’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues around the world, and he was part of the Kenya national pavilion at the 57th Edition of the Venice Biennale in 2017. He has also participated in the Young Congo Biennale 2019 in Kinshasa, Congo DRC and the 8th edition of the Ake Arts and Book Festival, Lagos, in 2020. His work is included in collections of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), Safaricom, the British Museum, Bates College of Art Museum, the East African Visual Arts Trust collection, and the World Bank Headquarters, among others. He lives in Limuru, Kenya