PRESENTATION: Grace Ndiritu-Healing The Museum

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Grace Ndiritu works as a visual artist, filmmaker, activist and shaman.  Both inside and outside the museum, she employs alternative methodologies for sharing, living together, caring, healing and reconciliation, with the aim of breaking the established cultural and social order and proposing new models for how to live.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: S.M.A.K. Museum Archive

“Healing The Museum” is the first mid-career retrospective dedicated to Grace Ndiritu’s diverse artistic practice. Performance, film, shamanism, social actions, publications, textile work and research into museum collections are all part of this multi-layered exhibition project, in which she argues for the re-energization and ethicalization of the museum space and, by extension, the whole of society. Ndiritu has conceived the exhibition for S.M.A.K. as a holistic journey through the museum galleries. Through a ‘spiritual overlay’ that follows the direction of the four cardinal winds, she introduces visitors to urgent themes along the way, including community, issues relating to indigenous peoples, ecology, blackness and feminism. The journey ends at The Temple, an architectural structure intended for a critical collection presentation but also a spiritual space for encounter, transformation and healing. “Healing The Museum” is part of Grace Ndiritu’s long-term research project of the same name, which she initiated in 2012 as a response to the spiritual decline in cultural institutions. It also encompasses Ndiritu’s artist residency at S.M.A.K. Under the title “A Spiritual Inventory of A 21st Century Museum”, the artist has spent the past year reflecting with staff on how to shape the museum of the future. “Black Beauty: For a Shamanic Cinemais” part of Grace Ndiritu’s research project into the extreme effects of migration, climate change and genetic mutation in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost region of the South American continent. A film scenario evolved from her research, like a visionary hallucination. In Ndiritu’s work, the fictional model Alexandra Cartier discusses contemporary issues, such as ecology and the pandemic, with the late Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The “Protest Carpets” are a series of artworks in tapestry form.Grace Ndiritu activates them during a diverse range of events. The artist guides participants, who gather around the carpets, through connective group exercises, such as meditation, word games, reading sessions or even writing love letters to enemies. For each carpet, Grace Ndiritu selected a striking image of a historic protest march or gathering in support of a social or political cause. “Plant Theatre for Plant People” took place over four days in October 2021 at Aberdeen Art Gallery. Led by Grace Ndiritu, and as-sisted by local artists Kinga Elliott and Aymee Charlton, participants came together to form a creative community inspired by plants and their natural habitats. “Plant Theatre for Plant People” aimed to create a community of people who could learn from plants through bonding and community-building exercises. The workshop included out-door meditation classes and an exploration of eco-activism through a spiritual awareness of plants. People made costumes, masks and placards. Protests and performances also played a part. The project culminated in a celebratory Plant People protest in which participants paraded through Aberdeen, wearing the outfits that were created during the project. “New Global Performances” is an internationally exhibited video series from the early 2000s. It comprises short studio performances addressing geopolitical issues that remain relevant today, including poverty, sustainable development, global debt and climate change. The performances aim to provide fresh insights and encourage you to think again. To heal a museum is to restore it to life. “The Temple” functions as a museum within a museum, but also as a house of prayer, or a quiet, domestic space in which people can live or meet. The architecture is reminiscent of a modernist exhibition structure but also refers to traditional building forms, such as African Adobe houses or the sweat lodges of the Canadian First Nations peoples. Focused sessions and shamanic performances will take place in this sacred space, and in the direct presence of the artworks. Transformation is made possible through the spiritual energy and heightened attention arising from these activities. Grace Ndiritu has been studying the museum’s permanent collection during her residency at S.M.A.K. She has selected a series of well-known, lesser-known and rarely shown works that relate to crucial concepts in her practice. In The Temple, she assembles works on sub-jects such as ecology, politics, transgressive and alternative systems, the feminism, the working classes, and black, brown and Indigenous peoples. She encourages visitors to keep an open mind when viewing the selection and to make intuitive connections. Ndiritu has brought three paintings by Li Yuan-chia, better known as LYC (1929-1994), an artist who greatly inspires her, into di-alogue with works from the collection. After an international career in China, Taiwan, Italy and the UK, LYC retreated to rural Cumbria (UK) to single-handedly establish a participatory arts centre that served both locals and fellow artists. This intervention complements Ndiritu’s own personal history in which she Ndiritu took the radical decision in 2012 only to spend time in the city when necessary, and to otherwise live in rural, alternative and spiritual communities offgrid. LYC’s intervention complements Grace Ndiritu’s own work in soft textiles into which she almost literally interweaves the threads of contemporary concerns with historical concepts. Ndiritu’s textile works in The Temple include “BW Kimono”, “Golden Hat”, “Egyptian Dress” and “Untitled Glasgow” edition, from the installation “Holy Mountain” (2015), a Glasgow School of Art commission for a shamanic performance in order to reactivate the burnt out Charles Rennie Mackintosh building.

Photo: Grace Ndiritu, Plant Theatre for Plant People, 2021, British Art Show 9, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 2021, Photo credit Stuart Whipps

Info: S.M.A.K. Museum, Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Belgium, Duration: 1/4-30/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://smak.be/