Artist Database

Kaloki Nyamai’s multidisciplinary art practice incorporates painting, performance and video, drawing heavily on the stories and oral history of his Kamba community. Originally trained in interior design and film, Kaloki launched his artistic career creating figurative artworks that engaged with the realities of the informal settlement of his childhood. He has since evolved his art practice into an investigation of personal identity and its connection to a wider collective history – this is evident in an ongoing preoccupation with the hidden, unrecorded narratives of his community and fragmented memory.

Nyamai’s artwork currently straddles the divide between the figurative and the abstract. His is a lengthy process that involves, to varying degrees, a laborious layering of paint on canvases that, themselves, have been cut and stitched together, sometimes charred, and which are further worked over with charcoal and sometimes spray paint. By adopting these modes of mark-making, he somehow mimics the complex interactions and social processes in which he is interested.

Nyamai has held solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally, including in Nairobi, Cape Town, London, Dubai, and Hamburg. Notable exhibitions include Ithokoo masuiluni at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (2024 – 2025), Twe Vaa at James Cohen Gallery in New York (2024) and Dining in Chaos and Moments That I Miss at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin (2023 and 2022).

His artwork has also been featured in biennales across the world, including the Venice Biennale (2022 and 2026); the Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025); the Dakar Biennale (2022); the Stellenbosch Triennale (2020); the Ostrale Biennale (2019); and the Kampala Biennale (2018).

Nyamai’s artwork is included in many private and institutional collections across the globe, such as the Dallas Art Museum, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art (SAFFCA), the Arthur Primas Collection, Fondation H in Madagascar and UTA Artist Space.

Biography courtesy of Circle Art Gallery.