Jackie Karuti (Kenyan, b. 1987)
Lives and works in Amsterdam
Jackie Karuti’s experimental practice employs the use of new media through drawings, video, installations and performance art. Her work is founded on ideas around knowledge production and accessibility, as well as the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination.
Karuti is an alumnus of Àsìko, the roaming Pan African art school established by the late Bisi Silva to redress the frequently outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa. Karuti’s work has been exhibited widely including at The Lofoten International Art Festival, Svolvær, Norway, 2019 and the Dak’Art Biennial, Senegal, 2018. Select solo exhibitions include: Body Machine Location, Kunstahlle Bern, Switzerland, 2023; Division: Before Line/After Image, Goethe Institut, Nairobi, 2022; Shapeshifting & The Impossibility of Weathered Wood, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Germany, 2021. Group exhibitions include East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021 and New Threads: Investigating Process and Material, Circle Art Gallery, 2018.
Other projects of Karuti’s that respond to her practice include programming the Out Film Festival in Nairobi, 2016-2018 and her online workspace I’ve Been Working on Some Magic. She was a 2019 resident artist at the WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels. Karuti received the ‘Young Artist Award’ at the Cape Town Art Fair in 2017. In 2020 she was awarded the Henrike Grohs Art Award which included a publication on her work released in 2022, titled Notes, Movement, Method. She was the 2021 recipient of the Follow - Fluxus scholarship, awarded by Kunstverein Wiesbaden. She had a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2023 and is currently a first year resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
More information about Karuti's practice can be found on her website: Third Room Studios