Peterson Kamwathi: Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa, Peterson Kamwathi's first institutional solo exhibition in Kenya. It brings together a new and expansive body of work spanning drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and video — and offering a comprehensive view of how these different practices speak to and extend one another in Kamwathi's work.

In the works gathered here, Kamwathi assembles figures, monuments, maps, and everyday objects into composite pictorial spaces that collapse multiple locations and histories into a single frame. The spaces his figures inhabit are deliberately unstable — terrains built from fragments of the real world, spliced and layered to draw out the connections between historical events and processes that continue to shape the present. Political monuments appear displaced and inverted. Quotidian objects are made monumental through scale and repetition. The ground beneath the figures and objects, the spaces they occupy, are as active and loaded as the figures themselves.

The exhibition takes its premise from the philosophical notion of the blank slate — and from the question of who benefits from declaring something empty. To call a place uninhabited, a signal absent, a culture void, is never innocent. It is a refusal of sight, and it has a history. That history is also the history of interference — of how our understanding of social and political realities is distorted through spectacularisation, and through the elevation of certain perspectives at the expense of others. Against this, Kamwathi proposes a mode of looking that is cumulative rather than linear, and oriented toward systems rather than isolated events.​

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