Always, In Spite of Everything

In the exhibition Always, in Spite of Everything Kenyan artist Mimi Cherono Ng’ok focuses on universal themes of identity, belonging, migration and growth – issues that affect us all.

Working with analogue photography, Cherono works to create temporal sculptures that chronicle the personal experience of journeying, and the act of departing for distant places. She invites the viewer to consider the intimate politics of home and belonging, as well as the possibilities inherent in dislocation or a lack of anchoring, and the routes one takes to find a way forward.

The works featured in the exhibition presents travelling as an elliptical narrative encompassing various locations, and explore the Cherono’s personal relationship to space, people and memories.

Mimi Cherono Ng'ok's elaborates on her practice:
”I moved to South Africa when I was nineteen. This was nine years after the end of apartheid. It was a place I fell deeply in love with and it still impacts me to this day. It was through my relationship with South Africa that I came to realise the emotionality of places, and the ways we relate intimate experiences to spaces. My work now consists of collecting fragments of places I encounter, documenting the familiar, the everyday, and the mundane. The photographs are not about one country, one city or one place but an emotional cartography of where I have been."

The exhibition is curated by Akinbode Akinbiyi and will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with texts by Manori Neelika Jawayardane and Akinbode Akinbiyi.

Mimi Cherono Ng'ok (1983) was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. She is educated from the Michaelis School of Art, Cape Town in 2006 and has a number of exhibitions behind her. She has been exhibited at the Bamako Encounters Biennale in November 2015. Currently she is participating in a group exhibition at The Walther Collection Project Space, New York until May 14th  and has been selected to represent Kenya at the Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art 2016 opening in May. The exhibition in Galleri Image is her first solo exhibition in Denmark.

Mimi Cherono Ng'ok will give an artist talk in Galleri Image on March 19 at 2 PM.

In connection with the exhibition, a seminar with Gabriela Salgado, Akinbode Akinbiyi and Mimi Cherono will be held on April 2nd at 2 PM entitled A Light in the Tropics, which will focus on young artists from the global south.

The exhibition is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and DCCD (CKU) and is a part of Images 16.