Muyaka Shitanda 05/07/2026
Muyaka Shitanda (1994) was born, raised and still lives in Nairobi, Kenya. He came to art not through formal training but through his father's photo archives and an old camera. He studied architecture, then began layering photography, collage and paint into richly worked images, and only started calling himself an artist in 2020. What grew from that late, quiet start became one of the most distinctive young voices in East African contemporary art.
His paintings carry something essential: not just an image, but a question about what it means to be human. Presence and absence. Identity that shifts. The mind drifting in and out of the present. Shitanda builds worlds where the ordinary turns strange and beautiful, and he builds them with feeling.
We're proud to welcome him as a guest in our continued appreciation gallery. With our Jali chapter, we're drawn to artists whose work carries memory, culture and quiet forms of storytelling. Shitanda's work does exactly that.
A Few Of His Works
What follows are a few of Muyaka Shitanda's paintings. Shadowed figures, richly pigmented backdrops, and that quiet tension between presence, identity and the unseen. Look slowly. Each one holds more than it first shows.
Beauty In The Chaos
Much of Shitanda's practice is about processing pain and finding what grows from it. He tears, breaks and reassembles his images, taking things apart to make a new whole. Not destruction for its own sake, but a search for balance between opposites: pleasure and pain, presence and absence, grief and grace.
"To know what pleasure is, you have to understand pain," he has said. That belief runs through the surfaces of his paintings. His figures are often blacked out or blown to pure silhouette, the detail burned away until only the essence of a person remains.
What stays behind is feeling. A body becomes a vessel, holding memory, mood and imagination at once. The work does not explain itself. It asks you to sit with it.
The Archive And The Kitenge
Shitanda's palette begins at home, in his father's archive of Kenya in the 1970s and 80s. He was struck by how expressive people were back then, family members in their Sunday best, at weddings and discos, dressed in bold kitenge prints and sharp, structured looks.
That memory shapes everything. His colours are intense and saturated, his surfaces distressed and analog, as if each image has aged and travelled through time. He is reaching back toward a Kenya he never knew, and rebuilding it in his own language.
It is a way of holding on. A culture of self-expression through clothing and gesture, captured once on film, now carried forward through paint into a new generation's hands.
Mind, Body And Living Freely
At the centre of Shitanda's work is a simple, radical question. What would the world look like if everyone had the space to live in accordance with their own natural mindset? What would beauty look like if society did not teach us how to dress or act?
His paintings explore the relationship between mind and body, between the individual and the pressure to fit narrow expectations. His figures exist in that tension: physically present, yet mentally somewhere freer. He is drawn to dark skin and to showing the beauty of his part of the world, deliberately placing different bodies in the frame and taking stereotypes apart.
The result is quiet but insistent. Each figure is a person choosing how to be seen, on their own terms.
The Black Cats
Black cats appear again and again across Shitanda's work. They sit in quiet communion with their shadowed owners, the human figures blacked out so they feel physically there but mentally elsewhere.
The reference is specific. In some coastal communities of Kenya, black cats are believed to be spirits, real or ghost, tied to omens and the unseen. Shitanda leans into that uncertainty rather than resolving it. Is the figure present or absent? Alive or spirit? He lets the question hang.
This is where his work is at its most Jali. It carries belief, memory and place, not as decoration, but as living storytelling passed quietly from one generation to the next.
Reflection
Muyaka Shitanda reminds us that making art can be a way of processing what it means to be alive. That a painting, torn apart and rebuilt, can say: this feeling is worth keeping. Your joy, your grief, your becoming, all of it matters.
In the West African tradition, the griot or jali is the keeper of shared memory. A storyteller and witness, trusted with carrying the life of a community forward through time. Shitanda does something close to that, but pointed toward the future rather than the past. He takes fragments, of family, of memory, of a self in transformation, and holds them steady long enough for us to see.
The things we wear and the way we present ourselves are never just aesthetic. They are declarations of where we come from and who we are becoming. Shitanda understood this from the archive onward, from his father's photographs of people dressed in their fullest expression. Every figure he paints is also, quietly, a portrait of someone choosing how to be seen.
His work does not belong to any fixed time. It belongs to anyone willing to look slowly.
Discover More
Step into the world of Muyaka Shitanda.
Take your time with the images. These are not fixed documents but invitations to look at identity, memory and transformation as living, shifting things.
