Thandiwe Muriu: I Am Because We Are

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Works

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Installation View

January 30, 2025 – March 3, 2025

Women have always been the unseen force shaping societies, even in a world that claims it can progress without us. But the truth is, our wisdom echoes through time, carried in the proverbs of our ancestors and the silent labor of those who came before us.

We are part of a nation of women, standing tall because of the history behind us, and yet, we bear not only our own story but the invisible histories of countless others. History is power— it is a call that reminds us that we can find our individual empowerment through collective actions.

I exist as I am because of who we are, and, because of the doors opened by the past, we can step forward into the future. We create a world where history becomes the foundation for a new tomorrow.

-Thandiwe Muriu

I Am Because We Are. The proverb underlies the foundational elements of Thandiwe Muriu’s photographic ethos. Saturated in rich fabrics, patterns, and tones, the work’s pop sensibility lures viewers into a world of color and design. The images invoke layered conversations about womanhood, empowerment, representation, time, history, autonomy, and community. The dizzying array of geometries and hues seduce, and the ideas they encapsulate engage with the world in a way that embodies the true sense of global dialogue, leaping from the humility of the domestic to the grandeur of high fashion. The subjects are presidential and quotidian. 

Frantz Fanon writes, “To speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture.” In this sense, Muriu engages with various languages simultaneously. First and foremost, it is a language of her home in Kenya, the spaces of so-called women’s work and the domestic, but simultaneously that of haute couture and fashion photography. At once a world of dreamers and queens, heroines and warriors. The language of the proverb appears, embodied in the camouflaged models, hidden by  traditional cloth, both as figure and ground, body and context. While the work interrogates the essential nature of womanhood, it does so expansively, poetically and humbly, with generosity and openness. Muriu’s photographs reject a passively rhetorical version of “What does it mean to be a woman?” Instead, they actively posit the possibility that a woman is and can be everything and anything, many things all at once and not bound by that multitude.

As Muriu herself explains, “One of the things we have lost in our quest for beauty and identity…is appreciating what was.” Too often there is an urge to deny or forget what came before, but Muriu’s work recuperates and preserves the past by animating something dynamically novel: “a new mix between modernism and tradition,” as she says.

As both artist and historian, sociologist and creative, Thandiwe Muriu is a master at forcing difficult and existential questions, underlying the complicated origins of her work with historical proverbs alongside modern objects; with textiles that comment on the fabric of society and glossy photographs that simultaneously remove their texture.

In the end,  I Am Because We Are speaks in the voice of the possible, the beautiful and the hopeful. As bell hooks wrote, “We fear those who speak about us who do not speak to us and with us. We know what it is like to be silenced. We know that the forces that silence us because they never want us to speak, differ from the forces that say speak, tell me your story.” Thandiwe Muriu’s work offers an invitation, a beckoning: to speak, to listen and to see. 

-Curators, Lauren Walsh and Keith Miller

Thandiwe Muriu, born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, discovered her passion for photography at an early age. Using her father’s old Nikon camera, she taught herself the fundamentals of the craft through books and video tutorials. By 2019, Thandiwe had established herself as a professional photographer, collaborating with major companies across East Africa. Her works have been commissioned by Apple, the United Nations, the Swiss Red Cross, and others. Her first solo show in Paris opened in October 2023. In 2024, her book, Camo was published. I Am Because We Are is the artist’s first solo show in New York.