Wanja Kimani

Wanja Kimani is a visual artist and writer based in Northamptonshire, UK. Her work flows between performance, film, text and textiles. She explores memory through the body and the fluidity within social structures that are designed to care and protect, but mutate into coercive forces within society. Driven by stories about real and imagined people and places, she places herself within narratives and uses her body to explore rurality and domesticity.

In 2021, she was commissioned by the Women’s Art Collection to respond to their exhibition, Maud Sulter: The Centre of the Frame and she created a film and publication, Tongues, which explored fairy tales, language and play. In her current body of work, she is experimenting with words, landscape and plant-derived watercolours. She is a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

This year, she is one of the artists to represent Kenya at the 59th Venice Biennale. She is presenting two works; Weathering Landscapes (2022), which is a series of plant-derived watercolours painted on found picture frames and Weathering Bodies (2022), which is a film that explores evolution, hypervisibility and factors that contribute to the weathering down of the body.