Enjoyable Night Out Clubbing... Sans Hangover

Kenya Tue 05-10-2010

Enjoyable Night Out Clubbing... Sans Hangover
By Frank Whalley | EastAfrican.co.ke

He took the mixture of text and images to recreate a long night out clubbing in what, I guess, was an amalgam of all the joints he has ever known, and then a few.

Mugithi by Tom Ogonga

Mugithi by Thom Ogonga

Photographer Peter Beard used this scrapbook technique to great effect in his book "End of the Game".

It is fair to say that Ogonga took a more spare approach but although the texturing was less dense and the references were simple, his paintings would have chimed readily with anyone who has ever visited a nightclub, then woken up with a heavy head and a puzzling absence of detail in their memory.

There were only six paintings to see, plus a video loop (a necessary adjunct, it seems, to any trendy exhibition).

In this case the loop showed a scantily clad dancer, wobbling a lot but not actually getting her kit off. Taste prevailed.

The exhibition, called Management Reserves the Right of Admission — on at the Kuona Trust arts centre, Nairobi, until last Thursday — was additionally interesting because it had an editor... step forward one Peterson Kamwathi, who took time out from painting, sculpting and printing, to write about his own youthful experience of scrapbooks and their relevance to the show.

They were “more or less a semi-private log that functioned as an archive of the cultural and social happenings of the time,” he told us in a note pinned to the wall.

Ogonga’s cultural references included a reveller lighting a fag, a stripper embracing her pole, four exhausted clubbers forming a mugithi train, a menu offering “today’s special drinks,” and a couple kissing next to a warning that, “excessive consumption of alcohol can be harmful to health.

Management Reserves the Right by Thom Ogonga

The visitors’ night out culminated in a painting of two patrons, one drunkenly holding a stripper’s stiletto shoe, his tie draped around her ankle, while his pal lay in blissful sleep, head on the table, out to the world.

Ogonga’s paint quality — smooth, effortless — mimicked the seamless surface of the coloured photographs stuck in so many scrapbooks, as Kamwathi noted.

And the man can paint rather well; highlights on a drinking glass and on a bottle of Scotch made that point without fuss.

Altogether, an enjoyable night out clubbing... and happily without a hangover.

________________________

And now, against the current backdrop of galleries closing and others fighting to survive, comes heartening news of a new one opening.

Called Diani Beach Art Gallery it is at, well, Diani Beach, strategically placed at the South Coast shopping centre and near the airport.

Its directors — brave souls — are Kim McKenzie of Kikoy.com, interior designer Helen Barker and marketing expert Anina von Wachtel. Managing the place is Mercy Onsinyo.

The gallery opened for business in mid-September with an official opening party planned for the 23rd of this month.

Kicking off with a mixed exhibition of 100 or so pieces, the gallery has been helped by the African Colours online gallery (AfricanColours.Com) who supplied a roll call of Kenya’s finest second-generation artists.

All the usual suspects are present, from Peterson Kamwathi and Richard Kimathi to Mary Collis and Beatrice Njoroge, with sculptors Maggie Otieno, Gakunju Kaigwa and Peter Walala exhibiting too.

A constant presence of Coastal artists is already a feature of the gallery, with names to look out for including Charlie Turle, Said Swabu and sculptor Tom Oneya.

A regional flavour has been added to the mix with the Eritrean Fitsum Behre — strong and wristy figure painting his specialty — the Ugandan Kizito Maria Kasuli and the Sudanese Yassir Ali.

Diani Beach Art Gallery is an ambitious project and deserves success. Let’s wish it well.

Posted By: Hirum Ndungu

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