Home_N Gallery

Home_N Gallery was a private gallery that opened the home of Nishio Kosakusho Nairobi Branch, in the Woodley area of Nairobi, as an exhibition space and workshop. It regularly hosted exhibitions and workshops themed around intriguing places, people, and things found in Nairobi. Here we introduce three of its main exhibitions.

The first, “MAP PAMOJA,” invited visitors to mark their favorite places on a map of Nairobi that covered an entire gallery wall. As the personal stories behind each chosen spot accumulated, looking over them one by one gradually reshaped the visitor’s own sense and image of life in Nairobi.

The second, “ANA MDOMO,” presented photographs of views seen through the windows of various homes across Nairobi. Alongside these, photographs of windows from households across Japan, gathered through an open call on the internet, were also exhibited, opening small windows within the gallery that connected Nairobi and Japan. This exhibition later toured to restaurants and galleries in a number of Nairobi’s distinctive neighborhoods. By opening a variety of windows within an otherwise enclosed exhibition space, the project proposed ways of nurturing the imagination needed to live together in an urban society where people of different backgrounds coexist, by increasing the channels connecting to the everyday lives of others elsewhere in the world.

The third exhibition presented a body of work born from “KANGAERU,” a project that recombines the patterns of kanga, the traditional East African cloth, according to each participant’s own rules and sensibilities. The title carries a double meaning in Japanese, evoking both “to think” (kangaeru) and “to change the kanga” (kanga o kaeru). Reconceiving the colorful and beautiful forms of kanga as material for creative expression and play, the project rearranges familiar, everyday patterns to generate new designs, whether alone or together with others. During the exhibition, a workshop corner was set up where visitors could try their hand at this creative process.