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Jackie Karuti's Labyrinth show is a paradox

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Jackie's repetitive paintings are filled with images that also repeat themselves. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

Jackie Karuti’s current solo exhibition at Kuona Trust is called Labyrinth, a title which is the first thing I have to challenge about her intriguing show.

For me, a labyrinth poses a challenge and yes, it can be a perplexing puzzle but it also implies an interrogation of pathways to figure out which one will get you where you want to go. In any case, for me, a labyrinth can also be a metaphor for something positive.

Karuti doesn't see it that way. For her, it's apparently a reference to something negative, deadly dull or even deadly and suicidal. The themes of death and suicide were topics she began interrogating in her previous solo show which she mounted while in South Africa during an art residency at The Bag Factory in Johannesburg.

Karuti carries those themes forward into her Labyrinth exhibition where her repetitive paintings are filled with images that also repeat themselves. The idea behind the paintings as well as the installation seems to be her desire to express the banal, boring and tedious, all of which could elicit negative, nihilistic feelings leading to one's contemplating suicide.

Yet Karuti hasn’t always had a fascination for banality, suicide and death. On the contrary, since she went public and participated in the 2012 group exhibition inspired by 'Wanjiku' and International Women's Day at Alliance Francaise, Jackie has enjoyed tremendous success.

She's participated in numerous exhibitions and artists' residencies both in and outside of Kenya. And she's even involved in an ongoing project that takes her around to both public and private libraries, together with other artists who are concerned about the fate of books, libraries and rousing public awareness of the immense value of books and reading.

Jackie hopes to take her Library project to other countries where she can continue exposing the beauty and value of libraries, books and reading.

What's more, Jackie's art has also evolved, both technically and intellectually since her artistic "debut" in 2012. Yet in a recent interview with Business Daily, she said she was no longer interested in what she calls "aesthetics". Instead, she's more keen to explore ideas, experiment with various materials and devise new modes of artistic expression.

For instance, her library project is meant to embrace the performativity and communal combined with installation art that also finds space for videography which will document the entire project.

In fact, the installation/exhibition of her Library Project which was held last year at Goethe Institute carried an element that might have foreshadowed what was to come since it was titled 'Where Books Go to Die'.

So for me, a more accurate title to Jackie's current Kuona show could be Paradox rather than Labyrinth. That's because it seems to me paradoxical that an artist who one day displays a deep affinity for books and delight in reading would also find the dismal, depressing topics of banality, suicide and death interesting topics to explore in her art.

Does she seem question the existential value of life itself?

In fact, I could even nickname her current installation 'Conundrum' since it doesn't explain how she could jump for the light to the darkness so easily. Instead, the doorway with the Exit sign over it is in fact, no exit at all, only a dead end and brick wall.

The only one resolution that one might find in Jackie's Labyrinth is in the mirror hanging from the brick wall which you can only see after you've opened the Exit door.

In that mirror, one only sees him or herself, which she seems to suggest is a sign in itself--that you can only find a way out of the tedium, or 'the rut' that you've got yourself into is by looking within yourself. It's the only way to find the path out of life's puzzle and problematic Labyrinth.

That ultimately may be what Jackie means.

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