Lot 51

Cyrus Kabiru (Kenyan, born 1984)
Mapacha (African Twins), 2020
Signed ‘Ckabiru’ (left blue panel)
Mixed media sculpture
47 x 48 x 12.5 cm
Ksh 350,000 – 500,000
(US$) 3,400 – 4,850
Provenance: direct from the artist

Sold Ksh 410,900

Spanning intricate sculptural works, photography, installation and film, Cyrus Kabiru’s practice reutilizes industrial detritus and reimagines discarded technologies. In his latest body of work, Kabiru reconstructs bicycles and analogue radios, exploring the impact and content of these culturally ubiquitous objects, which also played an important role in his own youth and creative development. Constructed entirely from found, discarded material from around the world, Kabiru’s composite radios contemplate post-industrial modernization through an aesthetics of refuse and reinvention.

Kabiru has exhibited extensively, with recent notable group exhibitions including: Material Insanity, MACAAL, Marrakech, and KUBATANA, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway, both 2019; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, 2018; All Things Being Equal, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2017; and Making Africa – A Continent of Contemporary Design, a travelling exhibition curated by Amelie Klein with Okwui Enwezor, at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 2015, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain and selected museums in the USA. He has held numerous solo exhibitions with SMAC Gallery in South Africa, and had solo presentations at art fairs in Nigeria, New York, South Africa and Spain. Artist residencies include: Africa First Residency in collaboration with START incubator project, Israel, 2019; Zeitz MOCAA Artist in Residency programme, Segera Retreat, Laikipia, Kenya, 2018; Fundació Han Nefkens residency in Barcelona, Spain, 2016. In 2016 Kabiru received a Quartz Africa Innovators award.