A peak into colonial past through art

Today marks the final day of Jessica Atieno's exhibition at the Red Hill Art Gallery.

When you enter the gallery, you are greeted by a series of what at first glance are reprinted archaic photographs, but upon a closer look, the works are a collage of different photographs, with the main image being a picture of precolonial Kenyan individuals, with other photographs superimposed in the background of the image through digital collage and printing.

These images are part of a wider project of Atieno's, which 'is informed by inquiries on perspectives on place, belonging and dispossession in post-colonial East Africa'. The artworks exhibited at Redhill are introspective investigations into our colonial past, in which Atieno works in the 'space between art, ethnography and research'.

Atieno makes 'returns to this past through its archival remains: historical photographs, maps and documents, looking into the fissures that defined the political space within traditional concepts of belonging'. The images created by Atieno are the results of ethnographic research, in which she sought out and acquired monographs and photographs from families and archives taken during the colonial period in and around Mombasa in the late 19th Century.

Once she acquired scans of these images, she "zoomed in and cropped the images and collaged the image with itself or re-contextualised it with a layer of another image". Her fascination with these images draws from her desire to "question what has formed that identity of me being Kenyan and African, and belonging to this heritage."

For the past two years, Atieno has been researching and lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the US. She says the different socio-political contexts of the US caused her to question her identity whilst living in a culture mostly alien to the one she belonged to. The artworks exhibited at Redhill are a vantage point into how are contemporary identity as Kenyans were formed in the distant past, and the visualisation of her findings and research into the Arab, Portuguese and British occupations of Kenya and Kenyans.

Some of the works are rightly described by Atieno as having a 'haunting' aesthetic. Indeed, Atieno says that "these interventions in the archive are not an attempt to heal these histories, but an investigation on how it continues to haunt the present". Aesthetically speaking, the works exhibited are intriguing in the way that Atieno has collaged old archival photographs and monographs of colonial subjects around the Coast.

In one piece, an old Swahili man sits on a chair in Muslim attire with a sword across his lap, and yet the image has been collaged with another monograph of what appears to be a forest. This is a particularly haunting image, as the Swahili man's face is completely hidden behind a collage of leaves and forest vegetation, making him appear faceless.

In another image, three African women sit on chairs with two standing in what looks like a typical early 20th-century posed studio photography session. Here, however, Atieno employs the same collage technique, obscuring the women's attire and clothing with a collage of forest vegetation, hiding any semblance of their identity.

Perhaps this is a metaphor for the ghostly nature of these colonial archives. Though many images from that time are available for all to see, much of that formative period of our history we can only guess.

Atieno's ethnographic musings in the form of digital collage and printed images are certainly a haunting and stimulating body of work, well worth viewing by the public.