SISI
JC Niala
Founder
Mumbi Muturi
Founder
Mumbi Muturi is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Nairobi, Kenya.
The trajectory behind becoming an established photographer, director and painter was all but orthodox yet led by Mumbi’s drive to master her craft and externalise her passion for telling stories through the lens or paint.
After self-teaching the fundamentals, Mumbi began considering a career in photography during a camping trip alongside fellow Kenyan photographers, an experience that taught her how to look at her work with a critical, detached eye. From then, she started experimenting with various subjects, one of the results is her personal project: Tarot Imagined series, and focusing on channeling the power of humanity through her images.
By capturing and manipulating light to her liking, Mumbi is able to extract the essence of her subjects and highlight their soul through a refined use of contrast. Her work interrogates the interaction between people and their surroundings, the juxtaposition of humanity and nature. Resilience and strength perspire through her images, whether still or moving. The stark use of colour is a metaphor of deep emotion, the state of the human condition.
Mumbi’s photography and water colour paintings were selected to be on show at One-Off Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya. She is also a member of the African Women Photographers organisation and a recipient of the Adobe Stock Development Fund.
JC Niala is an award-winning historian, artist and poet who creates in Kenya and the UK. Her practice is based on research carried out in the field or with museum collections. This infuses her literary, visual and performance pieces which are made to entertain and educate. Her work covers themes ranging from African and women’s history, our relationships with plants to medieval cosmopolitanism. She studied Creative Writing (MSt), Social Anthropology (MSc & DPhil) at Kellogg, St Anthony’s and St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford.
Passionate about conversation – JC uses podcasts to engage audiences from around the world. Her most recent podcast is The Root of the Matter with Wellcome Collection a series which explores what plants can teach us about being human. Her series Afro Historyscapes made with the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London tells the stories of African histories through objects in the museum. JC has a particular interest in the histories of African women both on the continent and the in the diaspora.
A key component of JC’s work is collaboration and in the growing season of 2021 she & ‘Fig’ recreated an English allotment in the style of the year 1918. The 1918 Allotment became a living memorial where visitors ate her research and remembered those they had lost in pandemics and wars. It was awarded the 2022 Social History Society’s Public History Prize for its ‘creativity and commitment to drawing attention to overlooked histories’. She co-founded the African Women’s Museum with Mumbi Muturi as a digital space for weaving together women’s stories past, present and into the future.