Waste and Metonymy exhibition at National Museum of Kenya from Jan22

Sponsored by British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA)
This exhibition carries the remnants of an event held at the BIEA in Nairobi on 24th October 2015, entitled Remains, Waste and Metonymy: A critical intervention into art/scholarship. That event sought to provoke new avenues of collaboration between artists, scholars and other cultural producers around the themes of waste, remains and metonymy.

The unifying question bringing the interventions traced here together is how an approach to stuff as incomplete, open-ended and emergent can offer critical scrutiny to the assumed finality, stability and comfort of ‘objects’, ‘persons’ and landscapes. Always ‘in the making’ remains and waste often appear like unfinished biographies, metaphors, symbols or narrations that promise but rarely deliver entirely coherent meanings, bounded entities and stable wholes. Their indeterminacy can be creatively explored to reveal the excessive multiplicities of time, substance and space.

In exhibiting the remnants of these interventions here, we seek to reflect on how the traces of events outlive their particular moments, mirroring how our approach emphasizes process than product, emergence rather than finality, the subjunctive rather than the conditional, and the possible rather than the certain. In bringing together a diversity of critical intellectualisms we seek to provoke longer explorations of the uneasy yet creative analytical space between scholarship and the arts around the themes of materiality and temporalit