Jackie Karuti

Jackie Karuti’s multidisciplinary and experimental practice includes drawing, painting, video, installation and interpretative performance. Centred around notions of death, sexuality, identity and urbanism, Karuti’s works are conceptualised through radical imagining. She often employs the idea of the Black Atlantic - an imagined underwater civilisation of slaves thrown overboard during the travel between Africa and the Americas. Through creating and navigating fictional worlds inhabited by fictional people, Karuti makes observations on that which is real and present: urban environments, migration and identity. Her inks and pencils on paper and video works feature assembled objects and movements in order to, as the artist says, intervene with reality rather than represent it. Her long-running The Case of Books performance regularly occupies spaces of reading – libraries or personal homes – and invites local residents to join the artist in dusting and restoring books to life. Fantasy and reality, hopefulness and morbidness are intertwined in Karuti’s works, reflecting a journey to find one’s identity.