GALLERIES: Naked women hand painted with the patterns of a computer motherboard get tongues wagging as gallery-goers seek deep meanings in the latest sally by Satirist Sublime, the internationally acclaimed Michael Soi.
An extraordinary exhibition by Michael Soi has been delighting and at times puzzling East African art lovers.
Hailed as Kenya’s Satirist Sublime, or Mischief Maker in Chief as many would have it, Soi filled a gallery and an adjoining corridor with some 14 colour photographs of painted bodies, most of them of women and nearly all of them topless with their breasts covered by only a thin layer of paint.
Yes, he painted them himself, even the nipples, all in the cause of art. And yes, he readily admits, it was a tough job but someone had to do it.
The idea of using the human body as a canvas is not at all new. Many cultures practice it, notably the Aborigines, the Nuer and Dinka of South Sudan, the Maasai and (historically) the Kikuyu too.
It has been taken up by many contemporary artists, particularly by Laula Senbanjo of Nigeria, who used it in videos featuring Beyonce (another trying task, but Senbanjo bravely stepped up to the plate) and who has spoken of it referencing Yoruba culture.
The idea of the body as a canvas struck home with Soi when, in Denmark, he chanced upon a copy of the seminal Africa Adorned by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher.
In it he found photographs of the Grey Ghosts of South Sudan, the Nuer, and was struck by the fact that not only was the human body a 3-D canvas but, unlike a static sculpture, it could move.
OK, so others got there first (going back at least 400,000 years to Zambia, archaeologists believe) but not every idea, nor every medium, is new. And after all, no one is criticised for painting a canvas or for carving a head in marble.
Back at his studio at the GoDown in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, Soi began to experiment, first by painting himself and then by advertising for models. He expected maybe half a dozen replies but received nearly 300… many from women offering to pay him to paint them.
A techie freak who always has the latest gadget to hand, Soi decided to use a pattern he had worked with since 2003 and one that appears consistently in his paintings; that of the angular grid of a computer motherboard.
Soi’s latest theme follows his satirical series of Fat Cats (2001), his City Girls who began in 2004 and are still going strong, even on handbags and cushions, his Omari series in which his hero seeks salvation by chasing white women, his China Loves Africa paintings of 2015, and his controversial view of contemporary religion, showing priests groping bar girls, which he started in 2015.
Now come his photographs of hand painted semi-nudes, under the title The Motherboard, and shown this month at the Circle Art Gallery in Lavington, Nairobi.
These photographs and the patterns that accompanied them were undeniably interesting. They held the eye — as did the decorated Makonde helmet mask plus five other painted carnival masks.
Maybe because of Soi’s track record it was tempting to read a great deal into all of this, and many visitors did exactly that.
The preponderance of painted breasts, for instance, suggested a concern with nurturing; apparently borne out by one photograph that showed a model holding a paper coffee cup containing a plant… nurture, growth, the patterns pushing the mothering theme even further.
Two works featuring painted boxers could have been a bold statement deliberately negating the theme — a deliberate destruction of the artist’s own thesis.
Interestingly, the faces of the female models were either turned from the camera, cropped out of the picture or masked, divorcing their identity from the narrative and maintaining their sexual privacy, while the boxer’s face was shown; nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
Then there was that puzzling piece showing an athlete (or maybe a model pretending to be an athlete; artistic artifice at work there) pulling on the toe of a running show, perhaps to ease a cramp. Called The Stretch, it could easily have symbolised the need to flex muscles from time to time.
In fact it could all have meant almost anything anyone wanted it to.
The reality, however, is that the whole thing was simply an artist testing an idea; an experiment; an exercise in aesthetics with no hidden meanings or ulterior motives or secret polemics.
There was no artist’s statement in these works other than, “Look at this, I’m trying out something I’ve not done before and wondering where it will take me.”
And I have the artist’s word for that.
I think he is telling the truth, because there is also the evidence of the catalogue (full colour and well worth collecting). It had none of the usual Circle curatorial explanations.
Instead, it was silent apart from a brief biography of the artist’s career and the fact that he was for the first time, “working directly with the human body.” And that was a silence, as they say, that spoke volumes.
