CIRCLE ART GALLERY

SWAB Barcelona 2019, Circle Art Gallery

Longinos Nagila (b. 1986)

Longinos is an experimental multimedia artist living and working in Nairobi, investigating the process and implications of mass production, industrialization and rapid urbanization. Nagila’s recent work centers the relationship between shapes and surfaces, and light, and with the viewer as well, creating objects that emphasize acts of looking and our interactions with objects before our eyes. The viewers’ interpretation of these compositions relies not so much on what is depicted as they do on our own knowledge and experiences, which determine how we read them. He offers us objects around which we can build ctions and narratives. For Nagila they are also an interrogation of what constitutes an art object, the materials used for art and the processes of art making from a social perspective.

After graduating from the Buruburu institute of Fine Arts, Nairobi in 2009, he went on to study documentary lm making at the Apulia Film Commission in Bari, Italy. Nagila has participated in numerous exhibitions both locally and internationally, along with participation in several art fairs. Recent group exhibitions include: Proximity to Power, Circle Art Gallery/ Goethe Insitut Nairobi, 2017; African Voices National Gallery of Zimbabwe, 2017; Freedom Flight Refuge, Circle Art Gallery, 2016, Error X, Ostrale, Dresden, 2016. He has had several solo exhibitions including: In Search of Alternative Utopias, The Art Space, Nairobi, 2017; Democracy My Piss, Kuona Trust, Nairobi, 2016; Technicians of the Sacred, The Art Space, Nairobi, 2016. Nagila’s work has also been shown in international art fairs - AKAA Paris, 2016, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, 2017 and the Cape Town Art Fair 2019.