Deal maker sees money and more in Kenyan art

To many Kenyans working in corporate and government circles, he is best known as the quintessential deal maker who has presided over some of the biggest financial transactions in the past 10 years.

After working for 15 years crafting multi-billion-shilling privatisations, mergers and acquisitions, deal-making runs in the blood of Vishal Agarwal, who works as a partner at consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

But there is one other thing - African art - that occupies a special place in the heart of the Indian-born, America-trained investment banker who first came to Kenya in 2004 on a deal-making mission and stayed.
Early in his career Mr Agarwal took time out from PwC to work as an investment banker, travelling to every corner of the globe to craft deals.

“Everywhere I went, I saw African art hanging in top notch hotels and on the walls of big corporations, yet when I came to Africa, I saw none of it in the businesses that I visited,” Mr Agarwal says. “I took this to mean that there was little appreciation of the social commentary that is contemporary African art.”

From this germinated the seeds of a passion that has seen Mr Agarwal dedicate a significant portion of his time and energy to spearhead the drive for Kenyan corporations to support contemporary East African art. Mr Agarwal is passionate about getting big business to support the arts in Kenya, just as he has seen them do in other parts of the world.

Having made Kenya his second home since 2004, Mr Agarwal says he is awed by the incredible dynamism and economic development that he has seen in Africa over the past nine years.

“This is clearly Africa’s time,” he said, noting that what’s happening across sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinary.

Society

Mr Agarwal says that the more he has gotten better acquainted with the region, the deeper he has been troubled by the huge and ever widening gap between the rapid economic advancement and the abject neglect of local culture and the arts.

Africa, he says, has so much invaluable art that is regularly flown out of the region to cultural capitals in Europe and the United States, making the ‘flight of [African] art’ only second to brain drain in terms of the value of what is shipped out.

Mr Agarwal blames the loss of this invaluable inheritance to the fact that there are few local patrons who fully appreciate what’s going on culturally, aesthetically and even socially in the realm of contemporary African art.

“The artists are not being promoted, yet all over the world it’s the artists who are the social commentators, who see what’s going on in society when others don’t,” he says.

PwC, the company Mr Agarwal works for, recently took up this mantle and sponsored a major exhibition of abstract art featuring eight Kenyan artists together with three expatriate artists who have been Kenyan residents for many years.

Curated by the Circle Art Agency, the showcase of the exhibition was the ground floor of PwC’s new headquarters in Nairobi’s Westlands, in the expansive and high-ceiling wing known as Delta Corner. (PwC bought the high-rise twin towers initially belonging to Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani late last year and officially moved in early this year.)

“The exhibition opened to the public on a Friday night, but the evening before, we had invited most of the CEOs in Kenya to a private showing of the artwork,” he said.

Moving to lead by example, PwC has recently commissioned one East African artist, El Tayeb Dawalbeit, to create a two-storied installation work of art that will stand solidly in the main lobby of the building.

The lobby itself is a work of modern art. Made out of glass and steel with solid marble floors, everything about this impressive high-vaulted space bespeaks PwC’s corporate power, cosmopolitan spirit and cultural sophistication.

Yet Mr Agarwal has mixed feelings about the lobby’s slightly impersonal architectural design as it could easily be transplanted to any global city in the world and it would easily fit in.

“What’s the point of working in a space that could just as well be found in London or New York?” he asks.

Mood

Noting that most corporate employees often spend more time at work than in their homes, he felt compelled to commission an East African artist to create a piece that communicates a more localised mood and texture to PwC employees and its visitors.

“Our idea is for the international to meet the local right here where the people may see how art can provide a social commentary on the times.

[The commission] is meant to enable the public to appreciate the way art can reflect social realities and also be socially relevant.

The selection of El Tayeb’s art was by no means a haphazard affair. On the contrary, Mr Agarwal worked closely with the three co-founders of Circle Art, Danda Jaroljmek, Fiona Fox and Arvind Vohora, to organise a competition for local artists who were asked to provide a written proposal stating the conceptual background of artwork they each wanted to design and install at PwC.

“We received a hundred proposals and short listed nine, out of which we selected El Tayeb’s,” says Mr Agarwal who likes the fact that El Tayeb’s proposal includes a multitude of colourful faces to be set within two tall three dimensional ‘frames’ he’s constructing from recycled wooden boxes.

All that is meant to make a powerful commentary on the universal value of human beings, irrespective of their colour, creed, gender or social standing.

The competition itself was a creative catalyst that propelled the nine Kenyan artists, (namely Dennis Muraguri, Gor Soudan, Paul Onditi, Justus Kyalo,  Xavier Verhoest, Anthony Okello, Sidney Mang’ong’o, Sam Hopkins and, of course, El Tayeb) to come up with ingenious ideas which they would construct in miniature as well as explain conceptually.

“My feeling is that artists are social commentators; their work reflects the times in which we live, and I want people, including our staff, to see the social value of the art.”

Though Mr Agarwal feels compelled to claim that Kenyan corporations have “a calling” to support the arts, he is quick to add that he is not simply being ‘philanthropic’ in the assignment.

“Contemporary African art is bloody good investment,” he says.

In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers has been investing in Kenyan art for several years, according the firm’s resident art consultant, Chou Sio.

A qualified architect by training, Ms Chou helped re-design the public spaces at the PwC Building, a process that got under way soon after she came on board and shortly after the company’s partners decided to acquire the twin towers for Sh4 billion.

She was also responsible back in 2007 for selecting a number of exceptional works of art by Kenyan contemporary artists, including Peterson Kamwathi, Yassir Ali, Anthony Okello, Elkana Ong’esa, Kotal Otieno, Tabitha wa Thuku and Jimnah Kimani, that now sit on the top floors of the building.

Confirmation of the fact that acquiring Kenyan art is an excellent investment came to Mr Agarwal just moments before we met in his penthouse office.

Prices

He had received word from Circle Art’s Danda Jaroljmek, who had just returned from London where eight Kenyan artists had sold their art at the prestigious Bonham’s Art Auction for substantially higher prices than she had anticipated.

“Of course, we paid a fraction of what those paintings are worth today,” said Ms Chou who visited all the artists’ studios before she presented her suggestions for the partners to finally approve for acquisition.

Today, Ms Chou’s selections conspicuously hung in the lounges and open-plan offices at PwC. “What’s the point of hanging paintings from other places when we are in Kenya and the artists have creative commentaries to make about our society,” Mr Agarwal says.

Being an investment banker as well as a PwC partner, Mr Agarwal’s main line of work involves ‘mergers and acquisitions’ (“I’m the resident ‘deal maker’ at PwC,” he says, noting he was intimately involved in designing the acquisition of the PwC twin towers.)

Mr Agarwal’s work also involves consulting with PwC clients and advising them on how best to maximise their profits. Today, he doesn’t shy away from encouraging clients to consider their own corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to see how supporting local artists can be part of it.

“Recently, an international client came in to discuss their building, a rural hospital as a service to that community,” Mr Agarwal recalls.

“I asked them what they intended to put on their hospital walls and I encouraged them to consider acquiring local art as a way of supporting the artists.”

Local art lovers can only hope corporate Kenya will take up the ‘calling’ that Mr Agarwal has sent out – to make supporting art part of their ‘corporate social responsibility’. For just as the African economy is on a roll and expanding rapidly, so is the value and the vital creative juices of the African artists.

When a man like Vishal (who knows a ‘good deal’ when he sees it) says now’s the time to collect African art, one would do well to sit up and listen. It could just be the new road to fortune.