Awuor Onyango

Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya

Artist statement

I SPECULATE, THEREFORE I COULD HAVE BEEN. I create in order to understand, to question or to transmute my understanding or questions into forms and languages that allow for other people to commune with me. My work is about cooking, the anthropophagical state of a consumerist culture in which we are forced to assimilate, playing both the cannibal and prey. I’m interested in the shape-shifting, the positioning as palatable, the shame, transgression, performance, aesthetics, coding and semiotics of the black, femme, woman and other. This interest is mainly drawn from my own experience navigating Kenya in a queer body and the fanonian amputations necessary to survive the intimate, the local and the global implications of my hypervisible existence. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves, often forcing us to confront the conditioning of our (colonial) perceptions. My main and most exciting challenge is the form in which this work appears and how accessible this form is to those I have created for without becoming reductionist. I follow in the ephemeral, interactive and lived art traditions of East Africa, in which the seeking is supreme and the art object merely evidence of the seeking. How do you tackle the immaterial in a material form that isn't immediately rendered redundant? How do we, as post colonial, queer, African black bodies navigate structures created to erase us through...

Artwork