Sonic Mass
04 – 31 October, 2024 @ Munyu, The Mall, Nairobi, Kenya.
Sophia Bauer, Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser, The JEHOVAS, Natasha Khanyola, militantA, noni muthoni, Sammy Mutinda, Collins Ndiangui, Jepkorir Rose, Milango Sanaa, Tizzita Tefera, Gathigia Warui, Adam Yawe
(image credits: Ian Gichohi)
Sonic Mass was an audio group exhibition, an outcome from the shared time spent in the listening and sounding workshop (facilitated by Sophia Bauer) that ran over six months preceding the exhibition. The artists transformed Munyu into a space where different sounds and narratives can come together, speak for themselves, be in conversation with each other, intermingle with and interrupt each other.
For my installation, Would that be a _________ sound?, I developed a composition, a texture, a landscape of the sounds around me that I have taken care to pay attention to and also collect. What is the practice of listening to the world around you and how can I bring the audience into my own experience of this practice? I hope the listener has the experience of recollection, of “this could be anywhere” or “I’ve heard that sound somewhere”. This is an active invitation to listen again.
TimeFeel or other ways to hang around
15 – 16 December, 2023 @ 32º East, Kampala, Uganda.
Darren Akoragye, Maria-Sheba Atukunda, Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser, Gerald Odil, Irma Wange
Following a three month long residency at 32º East in Kampala, the open studios served as an opportunity to invite others into the work and exploration that my fellow residents and I undertook in that time. I turned my studio into a video based installation.
Things fall away the closer you pay attention to something. There’s a dragonfly on the floor as you sweep away the dust in a room. There are only three legs left. Only four wings and everything is very dry. These four wings glitter in the light a little and the closer you look, the more the wing becomes a leaf. The more brown hair is revealed on its body – perhaps some sort of seed pod. Could the eyes be polished stone? The closer you look, the more things fall away around you. Backgrounds become soft colours, and periphery is stretched away; bent even, to the corners of the earth. Beyond it. The more you feel, the less space there is between your bodies. Where do you end and the dragonfly begin? Was it ever a dragonfly even, this assembly of leaves and stones and hair? The closer you get, the more things fall away, creating room for feeling, caring, knowing and expansion.
There Is A Time and A Place
12 May – 11 June, 2021 @ Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.
solo exhibition
Fraser uses drawing as a means to engage with the world around him through a varied approach that includes observational sketching, plant pressing, digital image collection and writing. This multifarious set of activities presents a unique opportunity to activate his interaction with his environment. This interactivity with the world strives towards a more internal and intuitive “knowing”; a knowing born less of experience and learning and more of dreaming. Fraser works through drawing to complicate meaning as well as create new relationships between objects and ideas. Disparate elements in the drawing field are allowed to take up similar qualities in space, eschewing the various contexts they would typically exist in. The drawing field itself is broken down so that one’s conventional approach to looking at and understanding it is revised. The drawings are energetic and enigmatic and in this way encourage the viewer to participate actively in the processes the artist himself uses.
(Gallery text)
If not now
11 October – 1 November, 2018 @ Cave Bureau, Nairobi, Kenya.
Andrew Irungu, Ijakaa Imo, Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser, Sujay Shah, Namikoye Wanjala, Agnes Waruguru
A group show that I curated in 2018. More information can be found HERE
If Not Now is an active participation in and a laying claim to a time and place that is (meant to be) equally available to those who make art-objects/concepts.
To wait then, is to wait eternally.
And if not now, when?