MALIZA KIASUWA featured in Metal Magazine

Maliza Kiasuwa – Bound by historyWords by Emma Smit

Morton Fine Art in Washington D.C. is featuring twenty-one works for the exhibit titled, Pride and Origins, by Kenyan-based artist Maliza Kiasuwa. This display is on view until June 30, 2021, and it showcases Kiasuwa’s investigations about the ongoing disproportionate exchanges between Africa and the Western world. Her pictorial symphonies are deeply rooted in Kenya’s cultural, social, and political context, but more generally of Africa and the modern world.

As a visual artist of European and African origin, Kiasuwa’s art transforms an isolated piece of unearthed material into an arrangement of personal narratives that tell the tales of her panoptic perspective and her own experience of the expression ‘double belonging,’ and of being othered. She blends handcrafted materials from Japan with found objects from around her farm on Lake Naivasha.

From mesh detailing, delicate embroidery and a foray of varied kinds of paper, she highlights the interconnectedness of the post-colonial landscape and its consumerist society. Transfiguring their meaning as separate beings, they lay in harmony as potential space for reconciliation once positioned together.
Maliza Kiasuwa’s exhibition Pride and Origins is now on view at Morton Fine Art in Washington D.C. until June 30.Common History 2, 2021Incomplete 1, 2021Imperfections, 2021Common History 4, 2021Common History 3, 2021Common History 1, 2021