Beyond: Munene Kariuki spotlights migration barriers

Munene Kariuki is a visionary and a realist combined. As a painter currently having his first solo exhibition at One Off Gallery, one can see he also has both intuitive insights and first-hand knowledge of what most Kenyans feel they need to obtain the quality of life that is fit for themselves and their families.

How he translates all that knowledge into visually interesting art is the stuff of his showcase of work that he entitles ‘Beyond’ at One Off. It’s the visionary in him that sees what’s required to get beyond all the obstacles, restrictions, and barriers, both physical and mental. It’s also the undercurrent of thought that offers hope despite the distress that people on the move are currently feeling.

Migration is a theme that Munene had been exploring long before the Covid-19 lockdown laid out so many barriers to people’s movement on a worldwide scale. People’s motivation for migrating ranged from mainly wars or economic hardship. Yet what Munene captures in his art are mainly portraits of people encountering specific obstacles to their momentum.

For instance, a work like ‘Remittance’ relates to the one who manages to get overseas, but then he’s constrained by family pressure to remit funds meant to sustain whole families. Yet little does family understand the hardships encountered.

His illustration of unemployment entitled ‘Seat 1’ and ‘Seat 2’ is a diptych, each side filled with a room-full of people but just one seat. Munene’s symbolism is often accessible, but in some instances not so much. In several of the 33 paintings in this show, many use either red and yellow ribbons or barrels to symbolise the obstacle impeding the migrants’ movement forward.

His ‘Labor Export’ feels especially relevant as Munene has painted men standing in a box. It’s the sort that farmers pack their potatoes in. In light of news that Kenyan troops are heading to Haiti or the Middle East where they’ll fight Houthi rebels, it’s Munene the visionary who painted his ‘Labor Export’ long before the President volunteered Kenyans to go.

Meanwhile, the precarious nature of a migrant’s life (be he coming from Eritrea or Pakistan) is suggested in his painting ‘The Journey’. In it, there’s only an inflatable boat and two hangman’s nooses. “You see that key painted next to the boat?” He asks the BDLife. “The key is meant to represent a successful journey, but you can see there’s no success here,” he adds referring specifically all the African migrants who cross the Sahara to reach Libya where they prepare their boat, hopefully to get them across the Mediterranean. But more frequently, it does not.

Other topics that Munene covers  range widely from ‘gender imbalance’ and ‘Biometrics’ (a form of global surveillance) to being ‘Distressed’ (and other mental issues related to stress) and the adage illustrated by Munene to mean to ‘Tighten up your belt’ or Kaza Mshipi in Kiswahili. It’s what Kenyans have been told to do in light of inflation, taxation, and in some cases, even starvation.

Munene never actually studied fine art in college, apart from the online courses he’s taken on YouTube. Otherwise, he was on his way to becoming a computer systems analyst while getting his first degree from Kenya Methodist University. He can’t say what exactly happened for him to take an about face and decide to become an artist.

“It was my mother who kept recommending that I go into the arts,” Munene says. So he dug in. He had already been going around to see art exhibition and got really good advice from Michael Musyoka at Brush tu Artists Collective. He also attended numerous workshops organised locally. That included one for refugee artists which is where he began to see how profound and complex is the problem of migration, especially when someone has to flee their country to save their life.

It was from his work with refugee artists that he was invited to University of Manchester to talk about migration and the incentive it has given him to create a work like ‘Misplaced Reality’. It was about people coming to and going from our region, specifically Kenya. Both sides encounter barriers to both enter and exit this country.

“It’s ironic that while many Africans want to go abroad for better education, better health care, better job prospects; meanwhile, Europeans (and now Chinese) are looking for ways to come into the country and stay,” he adds.