Mala Yamey

Actress with a long aqua dress, surrounded by four people assisting in an outdoor film shoot, based in a Spanish stone quarry

Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River* was an exhibition, running from 11th May - 16th July 2022, a public programme, which took place on 13th and 14th May, and an accompanying publication, at LUX, London.

The exhibition and programme called upon artists to expand the public’s horizons of temporal divides of past, present and future. Arising from the urgency of the global pandemic which has caused us to question the dominance of linear time, the artists investigated different subjectivities of time through moving image, live performance, workshops and text. The film-based exhibition was dedicated to the British Kenyan artist and activist, Grace Ndiritu (b.1982), whose practice is deeply concerned with our contemporary world, seeing it through the twin lenses of healing and spirituality, by finding alternative ways of living. Her archive of over forty 'hand-crafted' videos; post-hippie, pop-abstraction collages and shamanic performances reflect her alternative ways of looking and seeing the world through spiritual practice.

Inviting audiences to immerse themselves in Ndiritu’s two films: “A Week in the News: 7 Places We Think We Know, 7 News Stories We Think We Understand” (2010) and “Black Beauty” (2021), the exhibition reflected the artist’s explorations of “deep time”. The two works stood in dialogue with each other to enable the viewers to witness a continuity and development between the artist’s ideas across eleven years. Ndiritu’s intermediary film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (2015) was screened online for the first week of the exhibition. Her films blur the lines between different time frames and explore themes of media, authorship and historical narratives, whilst expanding on notions of temporality.

Grace Ndiritu’s debut short film “Black Beauty” has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022), 32nd FIDMarseille (2022), and British Art Show 9 (2022). Most recently her work has been featured at Flat Time House (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021/2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Kunsthal Gent (2021).

*Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River’s title was derived from Borges’ theories on the fluidity of time. Borges features as a fictional protagonist in Ndiritu’s “Black Beauty”, and his notion of “An Absolute River” was inspired by Heraclitus’ “No man ever steps in the same river twice”.

In the accompanying public programme, artists Rieko Whitfield, Serena Huang and Dr Jason Allen-Paisant guided audiences through an atemporal journey. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ ideas around the mysterious nature of time, the exhibition and programme explored alternative ideas of time to deconstruct widely accepted linear narratives.

The three contributors in the live programme each deal with critical conceptions of time in their practice. Visitors to the workshop led by Rieko Whitfield reflected on past histories through non-linear writing activities and guided meditation. Serena Huang invited her participants to reimagine potential futures using found objects to create a temporary work of theatrical art. Performing a soundscape with spoken word, Dr Jason Allen-Paisant explored the ways in which sound evades temporal categorisation and affects us differently to visual representations. The audience was invited to contemplate an unfinished past and imagine futures beyond linear time. The accompanying publication “Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River” offered different perspectives of temporality, and gave audiences opportunities to interact with these themes in a tangible and enduring way.

Mala, wearing a maroon jacket over a light blue dress, standing by water and greenery.

Mala Yamey is an independent curator, art historian and writer. In her practice, she aims to challenge how we consider received histories to highlight under-represented ones, and to connect artists, publics and institutions across geographies. She is interested in working in transnational networks with Western and Non-Western artists, celebrating multiple art histories. Her primary approach is how we can do this work with sincerity and prioritise alternatives to the western-centric.

Her practice builds on her final dissertation “Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India, MoMA, 1955: Challenging Narratives of Global and Modern Curating”. Researching this exhibition history, she investigated multiple modernisms and aimed to rupture the linear history of global exhibitions to emphasise alternate timescales for globalisation to the 1989 watershed moment. This work encouraged her to reflect on how she can learn from the uncharted histories from the Global South to bring them into our understanding of the curatorial today.

Mala co-curated “Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River” at LUX (11 May - 16 July), which took the form of an exhibition, public programme and publication. Working with Grace Ndiritu, Rieko Whitfield, Serena Huang and Dr Jason Allen-Paisant, the project revolved around alternate conceptions of time to western standards: exploring “deep time”, human and non-human experience, and postcolonial notions of temporality through the ephemerality of workshops, performance and film.

Since April 2022, she has been working as the Program Manager for Art South Asia Project, where she supports institutions, researchers and artists in South Asia and its diaspora to establish strongly rooted creative practice and build knowledge production in the region. This new position builds on her collaboration with Kochi Biennale Foundation to curate an edit of the 2021 Students Biennale on Google Arts and Culture this year. She has also built a strong writing portfolio as a freelance writer for La Gazette Drouot International in Paris. Mala started the RCA wanting to reframe her previous commercial experience as a gallery and sales assistant at Lévy Gorvy, and to craft a practice that is sensitive to her cultural background and research interests. She is now developing a sincere curatorial practice, and wants to continue her research into global art worlds and bringing their histories into the contemporary through oral traditions, performance and moving image practices.