20/05/2026
Video Premiere | Tabitha Wa Thuku – Recurring Forms
Can form “remember” the history of the gaze?
I invite you to watch a short documentary film dedicated to the work of Tabitha Wa Thuku — a Kenyan painter whose depictions of everyday life reveal surprising tensions between movement, the body, and the structure of space.
In the film, I examine her painting as a particular case of contemporary East African inspirations drawn from Cubism — not as a direct stylistic reference, but rather as the result of a longer and more complex visual trajectory:
from traditional African sculpture
→ through the European avant-garde (Cézanne, Picasso, Braque)
→ to contemporary East African painting
This is a story not about influence in a simple sense, but about the circulation of ways of seeing.
In the paintings of Tabitha Wa Thuku, everyday activities — care, work, movement — are transformed into arrangements of volumes and tensions. The body is not merely represented, but constructed as a form that organizes experience.
The film presents the paintings of Tabitha Wa Thuku alongside traditional African sculpture exhibited at African Art Gallery. This context allows for an analysis of the geometrization of figures and space present in her work, while also situating it within a broader history of modernity and its relationship to the legacy of African sculpture. It proposes an interpretation of form as a carrier of cultural memory and a mode of perception.
Author’s commentary: Aleksandra Łukaszewicz — cultural scholar, art theorist, and curator.
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Everyday life as form.
Form as the memory of the gaze.
Special thanks
African Art Gallery, Ryszard Stolarski — for the space and exhibits.
Production: Jeremi Czyżewski, Maciej Romanov
