Sujay Shah is an artist currently living and working in Kenya. Sujay uses the language of painting and drawing to satirize colonial pasts whilst also exploring absurd presents and futures. His work looks at the problematic aspects of big game hunting, safari and “conservation” of the colonial era and how these perceptions still haunt us today. In 2022, he was awarded a Venice travel fellowship by Wangechi Mutu Studio & in 2023 he had his first solo at Circle Gallery in Nairobi.
During his residency at 32° East, Sujay continued his work on big game hunting, safari and “conservation” of the colonial era. He created collages on canvas depicting big game mounted in colonial homes and lodges, as well as sculptures.
When Shah first applied for the residency, it was with the intention of focusing on continuing work on his paper collage/sculpture pieces. He’d expected to spend his three months developing these ideas which he had been playing with for sometime. However, once at 32° East, he felt compelled to continue with painting. He felt a sense of continuity after his first solo show in Nairobi, and also thought it would be interesting to continue painting with the coloured walls of his new studio. The height of the studio also meant he could be ambitious with scale.
In the end, his residency has been a combination of ideas; using other materials in a collage-like way, affixing and stitching raw canvas and paper with the painting – really trying to work with texture to enhance the perceptual experience of the artwork. This all happened by chance, from Shah’s attempts to make rug sculptures out of paper. As he was getting rid of the offcuts from these works, some landed on canvas that was lying in his studio, and Shah liked this chance encounter. His dad had a furniture store and from a young age he was surrounded by cut offs, threads and textured material. The raw canvas has a sensorial experience in a different way and he was drawn to the possibility of bringing these materials and experiences together. He was also inspired by seeing what’s happening at Aiduke, clothes being restitched and repurposed, and also the work of his fellow artists in residence, like how Ogwado fuses plastics and other materials, how Ian introduces other elements like flour and earth into his paints, and Ethel’s use of collage.
Shah’s work deals with the legacies of colonialism through the lens of conservation, and while in studio he has explored the saga of the man-eating lions of Tsavo. What does it look like to view the lions as a living manifestation of colonialism, a reminder of the brutality of early settlement and new invaders. Through his painting Shah is trying to think of them in a different way, as haunted spirits trying to rebalance the disturbance in the natural order brought on by this invasion. His other works cover baiting and trophy hunting, contrasting objects of luxury with moments of brutality. Satirising, questioning who the animal is for, when animals are hemmed in to be killed indiscriminately by hunters, while the people who co-existed with animals on their ancestral lands were and continued to be displaced.
Through finds in the 32° East library, Shah has delved into mythology and expressionism, taking inspiration from texts on Chris Ofili and Georg Baselitz. Reading the Contemporary has also given him an even greater appreciation for how post-modernism is a way to talk about people, spaces and places that according to the Western canon do not exist. Shah uses painting as a way to get two things that don’t belong together to co-exist, or to get many things to live together at once. Time scales, things from the past, present and future, can all be alluded to in one image. For him, painting also holds as a constant, the physicality of it serving as a reminder of the human behind the images.
