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Jess Atieno
Fractured self
Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.
View SeriesJess Atieno
Born in Nairobi, Jess Atieno’s practice is an act of reassembly—of memory, history, and identity. Drawing from colonial archives, she uses serigraphy and weaving to layer historical photographs with Swahili leso fabrics, creating tactile narratives that challenge and reclaim the past.
Her work navigates the duality of belonging and displacement, shaped by her own experience across continents. Atieno transforms static documents into living stories, inviting viewers to reconsider who holds the power to represent. Through texture, rhythm, and care, she reframes the colonial gaze—centering voices once erased and making space for new ways of rememberin
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Explore the artist's work, stories, and experiences tied to this episode's theme.
Leso & Postcolonial Identity
Atieno’s mixed-media textile works reframe colonial narratives by layering leso fabric with archival photographs and maps from East Africa’s colonial past. Through this process, she disrupts the detached gaze of historical documentation, instead offering a reclaimed visual language grounded in memory, symbolism, and resistance. The leso becomes both material and metaphor—a vehicle for moving through time, reinterpreting place, and confronting inherited histories. Atieno’s serigraphs and tapestries question fixed notions of belonging, using personal and collective memory to unsettle dominant understandings of postcolonial identity.