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Volume 2 presents the work of visual artist Sam Hopkins, who lives and works in Nairobi. Hopkins, who has been educated in Kenya, Cuba, at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and in Edinburgh, is a crucial representative of a certain young, transnational art scene in Nairobi. The scene is oriented towards, and part of, global networks; but at the same time its work is strictly rooted in the context that these artists work within, namely Kenya, and especially Nairobi.
In the tradition of “relational art”, many of Hopkins’ interventions are participatory or collaborative. For instance he has worked jointly with artist groups such as Slum-TV, Urban Mirror and Maasai Mbili. He uses different media such as public art, photography, video, installations, and texts. Often playful, surprising and ironic, his works depict the many worlds and perspectives that Nairobi is made up of – from the advertisements of witchdoctors revealing the wishes of Nairobi citizens to the life of pets in the most unlikely of places, like Kibera; from the wish machines of street photography to the diamonds formed by omnipresent shattered glass on Nairobi’s streets; from a satirical take on the rhetoric of the NGO industry to the self-representation of a community in Mathare.
The work in the book is accompanied by two interviews by John Kamau, as well as interviews by Lucrezia Cippitelli, Alexander Nikolic and Lukas Pusch; and texts by Alice W. Kingoina, Rand Pearson, Katharina Greven, Maida Gruden and Franziska Lukas.
The texts are in English.
