By Iminza Keboge
Published February 8, 2019
Five visual, screen and literary artists from Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe/South Africa have been selected for participation in the 2018 edition of the annual Artists In Residency (AIR) programme.
Ivy Brandie Chemutai Ng’ok, a young Kenyan painter who holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Fine Arts from Rhodes University of South Africa, is among the five winners of the coveted AIR opportunity. She has been selected for Fountainhead Residency in United States of America (USA).
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Born in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in 1989, Ng’ok, who goes by the name Chemu Ng’ok, is reported to have completed her studies while practising full time.
Chemu Ng’ok, who says she devotes herself to “investigating the dynamics of relationships on personal, psychological, political and spiritual levels” and uses paint “to expose the tensions hidden in the various African societies she has experienced, and to investigate how belief systems continually shift between indigenous tradition and western modernity, the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious, the scientific and the realm of superstition, myth, folklore and oral history”, has so far exhibited her creativity in South Africa, USA and Britain.
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Selected to join International Studio & Curatorial Programme (ISCP) in USA is Gerald Ralf Tawanda Machona, a South Africa-based Zimbabwean artist who, like Ng’ok, holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhodes University.
His Master’s thesis, ‘Imagine/nation: Mediating Xenophobia Through Visual and Performance Art’, developed as a supporting document to an exhibition titled Vabvakure, people from far away, which responds to the growing trends of violence perpetrated against African foreign nationals living in South Africa. The documents uses the term ‘afrophobia’ instead of ‘xenophobia’ on the argument that ‘not all foreign nationals [in South Africa] are at risk but selective targeting of working class black African foreign nationals seems to be the modus operandi’.
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While Kantarama Gahigiri, a Swiss/Rwandan filmmaker goes to Bundanon Trust in Australia, Ethiopia’s Heran Abate, who specialises in literature, shall head to Djerassi Residency in USA just as her Sierra Leonean counterpart, Joseph Kaifala, shall be received by Brazil’s Instituto Sacatar.
Cape Town (South Africa)-based Africa Centre (AC), that organises AIR initiative on behalf of its partners around the world, says it shall announce the AIR winner at Bellagio in Italy in April 2019.
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“Artists In Residency programme exists in response to the reality that; compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world, artists on the African continent have limited opportunities to participate in residency programmes,” AC says. “Our programme matches exceptional, socially-engaged African artists with residency opportunities around the world.”
