Interview with Danda Jaroljmek from Circle Art Agency, Nairobi.

I was staying in a boutique hotel in Nairobi, in a secure enclave in the Westlands not too far from the Circle Art Agency. On evening I decided to investigate the nearby shops, in particular a clothing boutique that had caught my eye. I entered the boutique and was warmly welcomed by the owner and several of her elegant customers who were sharing a bottle of wine: One of the young ladies was getting married. I was the only white woman there but that did not seem to matter. Once I said I was in Nairobi to find out about the art scene one of the women revealed she was an avid collector and the conversation veered from buying clothes to buying African art! After that I was all set to hear more about the art market in Nairobi.

I went to meet Danda Jaroljmek at the Circle Art Agency the next morning. Danda was Kuona Trust’s third director for eight years from 2004-2012. She then went to start an art advisory business Circle Art Agency in 2012 eventually growing it into a white cube gallery. I arrived to see the artist Dennis Muraguri close up his van with the few last pieces of his show stacked in the back. I had hoped to see the show but obviously I was too late! Some of his sculptures had caught my attention. Danda greeted me at the door and we went to sit in the viewing room.

It was immediately apparent to me that Danda had a strong personality, and very clear ideas of what she wanted to do. She rarely takes no for an answer and she believes in challenging her artists and her collectors.

We started talking about Dennis Muraguri’s latest exhibition where she encouraged or maybe more accurately told him to make new sculpture. He is a multimedia artist working in painting, printmaking, and sculpture and is mostly known for his Matatu  prints. In his work he explores the urban culture of contemporary Nairobi. She totally believes in him. She recalls an exchange she had with him prior to the exhibition.

Danda: “I would love to give you a show but you have to make new sculpture.”

Dennis: “I have done that before.”

Danda:” I know, but start again because actually they are more interesting. You do work in ways that nobody else does here and you also finish pieces in a refined way.”

She says to me: “People want to stroke his work, it is exhausting for him. Everything he does is very physical. He makes his large prints himself. He manages to work in a massive scale.”

 

His opening was a big success. He had a matatu (Kenyan minibus that is the main mode of public transport) outside on the lawn with a big video screen inside. It seems that those matatu rides, which can be very long are full of entertainment!

Though this was early August, a time when the gallery goes a bit dormant there was as much activity as ever.

In the background, I hear the cling- clang of corrugated iron sheets. Young men are installing The MoXibition/ Jobless Corner Campus conceived by Kevo Sterox and Sam Hopkins. A performative work, about the abundance of NGOs in Kenya, will demand the participation of the audience. Concurrently the gallery is shipping out a group of works on paper for a pop-up show in at the Peponi hotel in Lamu on the coast. That project has already run into a problem as the flight carrying the works just got cancelled! Notwithstanding this hiccup,  the show did take place and was successful. Though Lamu has been part of the scare list for tourists, it still holds a lot of appeal for the more adventurous and the people who own secondary homes there. It is also a magical place! The following week will be the exhibition of Michael Soi’s work at the gallery.

This is also the first year the gallery is doing art fairs, in Cape Town, Joburg, Dubai, New York, London and Paris. Danda wants to broaden the gallery’s exposure and play an active role in bringing East African art to an international audience. Because the East African art scene is still pretty fragmented, with each country still in the process of emerging in terms of contemporary art she is concerned that the South Africans will weigh in too much in the framing of East African contemporary art instead of the respective countries. We talk about her experience, the art scene, and the auction she has organized since 2013.

Born in the UK but raised in The Gambia Danda appeared on the Kenyan art scene in the late 1990’s. Trained as a sculptor she worked for the Triangle Arts Trust from 2000 to 2010 as the African co-coordinator and became Kuona Trust ’s director in 2004.

Danda explained that the second and third generation of Kenyan artists with the exception of a few who are internationally trained such as Ato Malinda, have been greatly influenced by the Kuona Trust and workshop system. Running parallel were the programs fostered by the Goethe Institute and the Alliance Francaise.

She recalls:

“It was a great privilege to be its third director. It was about networks, sharing experience and exchange. Information exchange. You have to have an outward look too. Kuona was the mothership.”

On the commercial side of things it was a slow process. Upon leaving Kuona Trust Danda shifted focus. She felt that there was still a lot to be done in terms of developing a market of buyers for these artists’ works.

She describes her new ventures.

DJ: After eight years at Kuona – it almost killed me – what do you do next? I have never been on the commercial side of things. But what was really apparent was there had been a huge focus on developing the artist and less focus on developing markets.

IW: How was their work being sold?

DJ: A lot of artists sell from their studios. People like to visit them. There is also Carol Lys’s One Off gallery, which has been very successful for a very long time. There was RaMoMa (Rahimtulla Museum of Modern art). A trust was set up and it opened a big gallery space. First in a tower block up the hill and then it purchased a great place in Parklands. It was very ambitious. They had four exhibitions that opened simultaneously once a month. Carol Lys was running it at the time and it did create a culture of visiting galleries. That is something we are quite focused on. We do a variety of things to attract different people to art – people who don’t necessarily have a background in art. You have to make it cool and the place to be. RaMoMa was successful but perhaps in the end overextended. We all learned from that mistake.

Carol went back to her original practice to having her gallery at home and in different locations. She has a lovely space in her garden.

I felt that we had to come up with alternative ways to the rules of how we show art here in Nairobi. I was lucky at the time because Fiona Fox – she had worked at the Tate – had moved here and she had set up the African Acquisition committee for the Tate. She had worked in Cairo at the Townhouse gallery. She contacted me and I said that I wanted to set up this organization. She and I spend the next six months researching and creating databases and making lists and we decided to start off as an agency providing art advisory services. I was terrified of opening a gallery and I am not a risk taker!!! . So we started small, just this office and the other small room (viewing room). We thought that one of the important things was to create new platforms so the auction idea happened.

ISW: As an art consultant you were grooming collectors. Were they mostly from here?

DJ: Our focus was entirely on that to start with.

IW: How did you do that?

DJ: One of our directors of the board is very much a man about town and in Kenya and knew lots of people. We tapped into his connections. People started to contact us. We wanted to do a series of events, pop-ups around Nairobi. Kenyans love a party. It is about the networking, being seen at an event. There are lots of VIP events that are glamorous in Nairobi but not traditionally a gallery opening night.

For the very first event I was contacted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. They wanted to commission some art. That is something very close to my heart. Actually my degree is in Public Art. I focused on site -specific work. There is not enough of it here. So we commissioned two artists: Dennis Muraguri is one of them and Eltayeb Dawalbeit did a huge piece in the foyer of Delta Towers in Westlands. I saw this ground floor, it was just covered in cement and I asked if I could use it for an exhibition and they said yes. We put together an exhibition very quickly in this enormous empty space with big windows. It looked like a giant warehouse and everyone walked in and said it was like being in Soho, New York – though it was more like we imagined it to be since most of us had not been to New York).

I always have been interested in abstraction. I am not a painter and I admire painters enormously. I think that there is still a lot of lack of understanding about abstract expressionism and I felt the space was perfect for it. It was almost sort of a homage to the 50’s in America and Britain. The show was called Xtract Subtract Abstract. We had quotes all over the walls about what abstraction was.

There is always an element of what we do that is educational. Everything we do is to introduce our audience to something new. Something unexpected – a new way of working or that art has the power to change things. That was a big bang opening and everyone was talking about it and suddenly people are coming to us and we got really good press for it.

ISW: The works on the wall were from local artists?

DJ: Yes. I had eight artists. We organized a think tank about why you make the work you do, who inspired you, do you have a text that has influenced you? It was a mixture of Kenyan, Sudanese, and European artists who have residence here. We get accused of not showing white artists. That is nonsense. In our auction we have only nationals (no matter what color you are). In the gallery we are less fussy. But if people are coming to the gallery to see East African art, they have to see East African art!

The shows did very well. We sold a lot. We have been lucky – The beginning of this year was a bit quiet with the banks closing but the last couple of months have been quite good.

IW: Are there repeat collectors?

DJ: I am actually doing some analysis on that. The collectors change. We do have people who buy for the first time and buy a few works and then stop buying. We have people who get obsessed and buy regularly. We don’t have enough of those, the real collector! We have the young generation of Kenyans who are dipping their toe, buying something small and thinking about it. And we have the international collectors now who come to us or buy from presentation that we send. As a buyer you trust us to be showing the best, or the art you should be looking at. It is still quite a mix and it depends on the platform. The auction is much more Kenyan than the gallery. The gallery is more long-term European residents but it depends on the show.

IW: How did the auction idea come about?

DJ: I manage the Robert Devereux’s trust at the moment. I have been doing it for a couple of years. In 2013 Giles Apiati from Bonham’s contacted him for the 2013 sale Africa Now. They were doing an African Focus on a country in Africa and it would be for charity. They had done one on Uganda and now they were on to Kenya. I put together eight really good works, which did very well. I don’t know when the idea for the auction came along but I think that Fiona and I felt it was a very traditional way to buy art, a safe way, and a transparent way.

At the first auction people did not understand the figures the art was going at. Everybody was a beginner at the art auction process. You would get two people bidding and suddenly the price would go way up beyond the actual value. But Giles said to me that people like to bid because they like to know there is an under bidder. They like to know they are not the only person who likes that work. It builds confidence. I did not understand it until our first auction.

IW: Did you have a mixed crowd?

DJ: We had a black Kenyan crowd, and many Asian Kenyans. It was crazy. We were turning people away. It was terrifying but it was a big success. It was down to the glamour of it. It was easy for us to put up an up market event because we had very good sponsors. All my years at Kuona I never managed to get corporate sponsorship except once from SafariCom. The minute I set up Circle art Agency and planned events, we had the banks, the luxury cars, the champagne companies asking to participate. Our commission is the profit, but it is six months work. Most of the pieces were primary market from Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia but we also had secondary market pieces. In the third auction in 2015 we featured 10 works that were consigned to us by the Emerson foundation, set up by hotelier and art collector in Zanzibar to raise money for various art projects in Zanzibar. We also had pieces from a woman in the US who had bought two Eli Kyeyene works in an estate sale in the US. We sold one in the second auction and the one in the third auction went for more than 3 times its high estimate!

Fantastic work Danda!

I saw her in London at the 1:54 fair where she was doing well selling Dennis Muraguri’s matatu prints, Jackie Karuti’s video and drawings and Ethiopian Ephrem Solomon’ bold portraits using woodcut and mixed media.

This fall she held her first photography show at the gallery curated by James Muriaki, which again was well received locally. The work was appealing and it makes me think that these artists would really benefit from a photography workshop such as the ones offered by the Market Workshop in Johannesburg. As usual a lack of infrastructure and funds are the main obstacles!

This is not an exhaustive report on the art scene in Nairobi – The Nest collective is unfortunately not included here – however it does illustrate the importance of developing local infrastructure. While contemporary art in Kenya is still in an emerging stage I think it is a very useful example of what is being done and also still needs to be done to create a self sustainable art scene.