Curiosity became the thing to which I returned over an over again as I took in If Not Now, looking at the work, thinking about it, writing about it, querying the artists’ intentions. My curiosity about the materials, the imagery, the ways of making, the artists’ curiosity about their mediums and their capacity to communicate – this is what persists. There is no unifying theme for the work in this show – at least none that is stated explicitly, none that can be gleaned from a cursory viewing of the works. And yet, it is exactly this absence of thematic consensus that made If Not Now such a thrill to witness.

 

At first, I thought it obsessive - Agnes Waruguru’s braiding of yarn. The repetition of a pattern; a single movement of fingers multiplied countless times; over and under, looping in and out for prolonged periods of a time. This manipulation of the object at this small scale struck me as a curious choice.

 

The braided strands of yarn appear wound around a piece of cloth, forming a waist from which the excess fabric spills out. The yarn strands, longer still, fall further down from this light, suspended bundle, down to the floor and outward, flowing like the tributaries of a delta, leading, simultaneously, away from and back to the source. Like paths laid out for us to follow. On the cloth is printed a study of a plant which, Waruguru says, she saw daily, while going to and from her studio during a residency in Sydney, Australia. She undertook almost all of the crocheting during train rides. This information leads me to rethink my earlier assessment.

 

It occurs to me that obsessive is too hurried a reading, flippant even. To think of the gestures involved in the making of this work – and that of its sister nearby, a latticework of clear, glass beads, also suspended – braiding yarn, threading beads, folding, draping, winding, is to see the work anew. Waruguru adopts, but never transforms these workaday elements and processes. She relies precisely on the familiarity of these acts of making to denote the passing of time, and to emphasize the material labour that goes into the conjuring of these objects. Obsessive? No. Tender, perhaps.

 

Photographs, black and white, in which the body, the presumed subject, exists in a manner best described as spectral. In these images by Namikoye Wanjala, greys and blacks rise and fall over each other, lapping at one another’s edges, and slivers of body slip in and out of view. The figure is never completely solid, never completely present, and instead you find yourself trying to make out the edges, to decipher a form, to call this errant body to rest.

 

Of what use is it to know that these photographs are made entirely by Wanjala, alone in the confines of their room? Setting up the camera, then setting themselves in front of it to have their every movement recorded. Dancing and jumping and gliding and writhing, taut and limp, at rest or in flight, buckling and straightening – all these movements Wanjala makes with their body, and all are captured on camera. Each of these innumerable actions takes place within the confines of their room. This private space becomes the site of a mental and emotional struggle, a wrestling with the self that’s folded and flattened and made into the photographs we see.

 

As you attempt to keep sight of those slivers of body – a face here, a stray limb there - in these images, so too the artist tries to find solid ground. And all this is borne to us by way of five relatively small photographs on a wall. Again, I see an artist’s invitation, a laying bare of moments spent alone – Waruguru’s solitary walks and train rides, Wanjala’s minutes hours alone in their room.

 

Strung up with fish line and suspended from a metal framework, Ijakaa Imo’s charcoal briquettes cast a shadow on an adjacent wall. It is a barely decipherable silhouette of his departed father. Whether this amorphous quality of the shadow is intentional remains unknown, but this effort at memorialization yields a potentially compelling figurative statement, one that relies on objects and processes, he tells me, that he learned from his father. Ijakaa, inadvertently it seems, escapes a literal depiction and, instead leaves his viewer with a suggestion, a proposition, an invocation, if I am to be insistent, of a past life.

 

One could read the play of light and shadow, the alternating between solid forms and voids, as an allusion to the waxing and waning of memory. The varying sizes and textures of the pieces of charcoal, the uneven density of the installation, some pieces packed close together and other hung with greater distances in between, these inconsistencies reveal the challenge of remembering, the slipperiness inherent to trying to depict something present only in his memory.

 

I arrive at Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser’s work thinking, again, of repetitive, obsessive gestures, inhabited spaces, and attention paid to minutiae.

 

Frottage: (v) to rub onto one surface placed on another surface in order to create a mottled or patterned area on the first surface.

 

The surfaces of choice for Fraser are the tiles of his kitchen and living room floors and human figures cut out from canvas. In the resulting rubbings, his figures are soft-edged and their colour is the same as that of the tile on which they are laid. The tile patterns form a grid, like grills through which we see the figures, which seem to contemplate their surroundings, sizing up these geometric spaces in which they find themselves.

 

Mottled is an almost accurate description of the resulting texture, as Fraser rubs, teases these disparate surfaces into single-layer compositions that flow to the very edge of the paper, as though they themselves are excised from a greater, boundless world. Rendered in pastel, the pigments sitting precariously on the surface of the paper, held in place only by fixative, Fraser’s figures represent yet another ghostly development in If Not Now, following Wanjala and Ijakaa. Objects in space, listless apparitions indistinct from their surroundings, but seemingly at ease, unbothered by the arbitrariness of their circumstances.

 

“(…) All is vanity.” – Ecclesiastes 1:2

 

Mindless, unending, alienating toil – always bigger, longer, always striving for more, and never quite sure of the why of it all

 

There’s an uncanny dialogue between Sujay Shah’s loopy, cartooned figures, caught in the everyday drudgery of (white-collar) professional life, and Andrew Chege’s dark paintings of the ever-increasing high-rise buildings that have become an inescapable sight in Nairobi.  Shah’s absurdist takes on the manner in which we go about our daily routines finds form in the caricatures in his drawings, where their bulbous heads and ribbon-like limbs are inseparable from their pulpy surroundings. These figures, with their dulled blues, purples and browns, sat weeping on a toilet or ambling to/from work (presumably), seem trapped in this hamster-wheel of stultifying ordinariness and Shah offers them no respite.

 

Chege’s dark, almost startling paintings of concrete structures revel in their (the buildings’) monumentality, and the ridiculousness of it; black and grey and blue, frozen in time, or out of time. These compositions are emptied of human life and we are left only with the debris-in-waiting of human activity. In one painting, slender as though looking through a gap between grills in a window, we see nothing but the top end of a crane set against a sky made ominous by the artist’s choice of greys. Much like Sujay, Chege offers nothing beyond the bare, unembellished reality of our lives, pointing instead to that nagging, ever-present inkling of futility in so much that we do.

 

Precious, personal, lighthearted, suspicious, open-ended, these and more describe the work in If Not Now. Loosed from the insistence on themes and commentary, it unfolded as a frolic among the fixations, distractions, and formal dalliances of these six artists. Charcoal, yarn, and bone-glue-mixed pigments; bodies suspended in space (and time), urban architecture, and lives past, all appear in this small, unencumbered, intimate show. Their curiosity, these earnest attempts at communicating what it means to be in and of a place, and to test their limits as creators made for a truly enjoyable experience.