Photographer Andrew Tshabangu’s fascination with space and the structures of everyday life has taken him to the far corners of Africa.
‘I believe that spaces, for instance one-room homes in informal settlements or locations, speak volumes about the people that inhabit them,” says Tshabangu about his latest show, titled Kibira Nimoja, which portrays life in a poor district of Nairobi, Kenya. ‘The arrangement of personal possessions in a room is reflective of the personality of its resident. Each room has a historical context, chronicling the lives of the people that interact daily in those spaces.”
Tshabangu says he chose Nairobi’s Kibira shantytown because it gave him an opportunity to ‘navigate” its limiting density and because it had been the site of violent protest in 2008. The work came out of a workshop Tshabangu did for the Nairobi Art Trust and Centre for Contemporary Art of East Africa that year.
Gallery MOMO, 52 Seventh Avenue, Parktown North, until August 22. Tel: 011 327 3247.