I am a multidisciplinary artist who examines cultural displacement, history, collective memories, and the legacies of colonialism by using installation, performance, and video. My art is greatly informed by my move from Kenya to the United States, and thus it is a tool for exploring, navigating and representing the socio-political and cultural differences I have encountered as a Kenyan woman in the United States. By working in three-dimensional and time-based media, I explore the ways in which my identity as a Kenyan woman informs how I navigate space and time, and how sociological constructions, like colonialism and patriarchal ideology, still affect my experiences today.

My installations are composed of objects and images that have I appropriated from Kenya and the United States; objects such as East African fabrics, soil and cleaning utensils. These objects are altered materially, in ways that highlight them as markers of African femininity and of indigeneity. They are also altered contextually, by combining them with other media in installations, such as performance, video and even print. I use these methods to construct spaces that comment on the resilience of African women in finding ideological spaces of belonging and collective autonomy in the presence of hegemonies like colonialism, western exceptionalism and patriarchal ideology.

My recent body of work appropriates the ethnographic museum space and investigates the vestiges of colonialism still prevalent in the style of display accorded to continental African artifacts. I use performance to insert the body as artifact into the space, which, by construction, lacks such an intervention. I also use 3D animation to create fantastical, sentient, amorphous African artifacts who have challenges in defining their own identity. I use these practices to raise questions on the internal/external perceptions of identity, especially in finding autonomy in the wake of suppressive sociological power systems.

In appropriating existing spaces, I challenge the intentions that go into creating and sustaining such spaces, especially when those intentions are masks of hegemonic histories and narratives. In creating spaces of my own, I explore the possibilities of radical spaces: spaces that soothe and heal, as well as provoke and protest. I, therefore, use art to question the power dynamics of creating a space.