Landscapes from Home: championing nuanced, honest african narratives
title image: Rift valley escarptment, 2025. Coster Ojwang’
Landscapes from Home is a debut group exhibition curated by the founder of asili creatives, Stephanie Chianda.
It brings together a conscious selection of emerging Kenyan artists whose practices engage deeply with memory, identity, and the evolving concept of home. exploring landscape not merely as a physical environment, but as an emotional, psychological, and cultural terrain shaped by lived experience.
weight of absence, 2025. Doryn Mueni
Rooted in long-term engagement rather than thematic abstraction, the exhibition reflects on the relationships built through conversation, trust, and sustained connection. The featured artists — Coster Ojwang’, Sheila Bayley, Viktart Mwangi, Doryn Mueni, Andrew CRAE, and Swift9 Graffiti — are artists chianda has connected with personally, engaged in ongoing dialogue with, and collected works from. The exhibition emerges from these relationships, positioning care, mutual respect, and artistic integrity at its core.
Each artist offers a distinct interpretation of landscape as a lived and remembered space. Some works reference specific geographies — rural homelands, urban neighbourhoods, or transitional spaces — while others map interior worlds shaped by emotion, memory, and longing. Across painting and mixed media, the exhibition reveals how landscape can act as both archive and projection: a place we return to, resist, reimagine, or carry within us.
By the border, 2025. viktart mwangi
Collectively, the works resist singular narratives of Kenyan identity or place. Instead, they reflect multiplicity — the co-existence of tradition and change, belonging and displacement, rootedness and progression. Landscapes from Home invites viewers to consider how home is continually reconstructed through memory, experience, and time, particularly within the contemporary African context.
Beyond the exhibition itself, Landscapes from Home is also conceived as a point of access for new audiences, particularly Africans interested in beginning or expanding their art collections. By presenting works within a considered yet welcoming curatorial framework, the exhibition seeks to demystify the process of collecting, encouraging viewers to engage with contemporary art not as distant and inaccessible, but as something personal, attainable, and rooted in shared cultural experiences. The exhibition foregrounds collecting as an act of connection — to artists, to stories, and to a living cultural landscape.
The people shall, 2025. Swift9 grafitti
This approach reflects a commitment to nurturing a more confident and informed generation of collectors, and to strengthening local and diasporic support for emerging artists. Through conversation, transparency, and care, Landscapes from Home aims to create a space where African audiences feel invited to ask questions, build relationships, and see themselves as active participants in the art ecosystem.
Curated with an ethos of accessibility, dialogue, and representation, this exhibition marks the beginning of chianda’s curatorial practice — one dedicated to fostering meaningful connections between artists, collectors, and audiences, and to championing nuanced, honest narratives that expand how contemporary African art is encountered and understood.
they are watching, 2024. Sheila bayley
the exhibition opens at the african centre in London on the 15th, January 2026 and 6pm and then daily from the 16th-23rd january 2026 10am-6pm. to RSVP to the opening night/private view book here.
the time has come, 2025. andrew crae
