Jess Atieno maintains a practice informed by inquiries on place, home and dispossession through the lens of the post-colonial. Atieno sees herself as carrying inscriptions of a colonial past and studying as an adult in the US made her increasingly unable to situate herself in a static reality of belonging. With this inspiration, Atieno time travels into history through its material remains: historical photographs, maps and documents, employing them in prints, installations and tapestry. She turns to the idea of place as the transformative site of hybridity that offers alternative strategies for and models of representation within the post-colonial.
Jess Atieno was born in 1991 in Nairobi, Kenya. After training at the Asiko School of Art in Lagos, Nigeria, Jess Atieno has graduated with an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA in 2021. She currently lives and works in Chicago, USA.Atieno also founded the Nairobi Print Project, an open source online library for artistic and curatorial research informed by African colonial and diaspora histories. The library will be the first of its kind in the region.
Recent exhibitions: Ubuntu, I am because We Are, World Trade Organization Headquarters, (Geneva, 2022);Of Ghostly Silences and Constant Yearnings, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjian, 2022); I Will See What I Want to See, Circle Art Gallery, (Nairobi, 2019); 730 Servings of Yesterday’s Terror, Lagos Biennale (Lagos, 2019); The Making of Worlds, Festung Hohensalzburg, (Salzburg, 2019)