Tracing the space between analogue and digital, perception and presence
The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), in collaboration with munyu, opened ‘Between Signals’ on 2 November 2025, a multidisciplinary exhibition that remains on view through 31 December 2025. Bringing together artists whose practices move between the analogue and the digital, the exhibition invites visitors into sensory and speculative realms shaped by sound, memory, texture, scent, and embodied experience.
Expanding Perception Through Sensory Practice
At the heart of ‘Between Signals’ is a commitment to sensory immersion. The exhibition unfolds through installations that employ light, sound, vibration, scent, and temporal shifts, encouraging visitors to slow down and consider how the body gathers and interprets information. Instead of a linear viewing experience, the exhibition offers a constellation of encounters that allow audiences to wander, listen, smell, and feel.
Participatory programs extend this approach outward. Conversation circles, guided sensory walks, listening sessions, dispersed QR prompts, and other activations form a connective tissue that turns the exhibition into an active field of attention. The show positions perception as both a personal and collective capacity, shaped by the signals we consciously and unconsciously receive.
Between Infrastructure and Imagination
Beyond its sensory landscape, ‘Between Signals’ is grounded in a critical inquiry into artistic infrastructure. The exhibition examines the material, political, and economic forces that shape cultural production in Nairobi and beyond, acknowledging the uneven systems within which artists create and gather.
By considering questions of access, governance, maintenance, and care, the show models alternative ways of thinking about cultural space. Art, in this context, becomes an engine for collective imagining, a means of considering how support systems might evolve to sustain artistic life.
Artists Working Across Mediums and Worlds
The exhibition brings together a dynamic constellation of practitioners who work across sound, moving image, scent, performance, installation, drawing, and digital experimentation. Participating artists include Sophia Bauer, Natasha Khanyola, James Kamande, Joy Mala, Ndung’u Mbithi, Muthoni ni Mimi, Anthony Muisyo, Sound of Nairobi, Kamwangi Njue, Cynthia Nyakiro, Awuor Onyango, Kimani Sam K., Kevo Stero, Tizzita Tefera, Wakianda, Adam Yawe, and Chela Yego.
Their works create multiple thresholds between worlds, activating themes of memory, ecology, technology, embodied knowledge, and the shifting boundaries between human and machine. Collectively, they offer new ways of thinking about perception and presence.
munyu: A Living Experiment in Artistic Infrastructure
Founded in 2024, munyu serves as a collaborative, continuously evolving space for artistic practice. Structured as an egalitarian, non-hierarchical model, it is coordinated by its resident artists on a rotating basis. As a site for experimentation, munyu prioritises community, process, and shared responsibility, challenging conventional models of cultural infrastructure.
Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute: Preserving and Presenting East African Art
The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) is a nonprofit space dedicated to the presentation, research, and preservation of modern and contemporary art in East Africa. Through exhibitions, archival work, public programs, and educational initiatives, NCAI continues the rich legacy of earlier institutions that shaped the region’s artistic landscape.
‘Between Signals’ is on view at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute until 31 December 2025. For more information, visit ncai254.com.
