Jackie Karuti

Jackie Karuti is based in Amsterdam via Nairobi. Her work departs from drawing whereby the moving & projected image is considered & used as a way to generate thought. Her practice is founded on ideas around looking, image construction, knowledge production & the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination.   

The voice of a British man narrates a film produced in the 1950’s describing the moment when Nairobi transitions from a small town into a city. This was made by the Colonial Film Unit (CFU); a mobile cinema outfit established by the British colonial government. Its task was to produce instructional or educational films that were also instrumental in spreading propaganda while presenting African audiences as passive & simple minded.

In an effort to counter-balance this depiction of progress, the dominant voice of the narrator is punctuated by machines at work and cattle and sheep roaming in present day Nairobi. The choice to not show footage of the film embraces refusal as a device that recognises a system that renders one illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the focus shifts towards image construction through weighing, measuring and searching for the image and thinking about the logistics involved in setting up an imperfect cinema. The studio becomes a support structure that gives an open exploratory quality to the work unlike the didactic tone of the films made by the CFU. This propels the work towards a future abstraction with new active audiences.

Throughout the search for the image, distance is warped and displacement occurs through reconfigured periscopes that reflect back the studio in distorted, illusionary and multi-dimensional ways. In the end, the image constructed remains elusive as an immeasurable volume and a weight whose balance cannot be determined nor reconciled with.

Links to audio transcripts featured:

Nairobi

Work = Force x Distance