Due to the good response from visitors, the group photo exhibition 'Ubuntu, Humanity and Environment' at the Ardhi Gallery in Nairobi, in which Italian photographer and member of our portal Leni Frau is also participating, has been extended until 8 April. The exhibition was due to close on 29 February.
Leni exhibited shots taken from her series "No ghosts in Dandora", together with those of 19 other Kenyan, African and Dutch artists who share visions of "resilience, interaction with the drifts of humanity and the environment" with their own personal way of representing them, all devoted to highlighting very similar situations, such as degradation, suffering, illness, exclusion, reconquest of the environment and the search for one's own space, using original narrative methods and working in their own way on the images produced.

The 'chronicle' of Mathare by the Kenyan photographer Julius Mwelu and his foundation to initiate young people into the profession is interesting. Mwelu began in a rudimentary manner, with a camera donated by an American Ngo, filming the post-election violence of 2007 that had devastating effects precisely in Mathare, with dozens of deaths, and gradually documented life in the slum, growing a school of young talents who took an alternative route to the 'dead end' of life on the fringes of legality and hope. Just as there is beauty in the bright colours of the Nubian wedding in the capital's other big slum, Kibera, in the lens of Kevin Kimani, and in the living, speaking images of Alfred Wango, also from Kibera. A different discourse deserves Dennis Otieno, a conceptual artist who stages 'talking pictures', setting up real sets in the middle of the city and narrating the changes and the dangers of their unsustainability.

In the midst of many other interesting Kenyan artists and the Ghanaian Lomotey, "Ubuntu" also presents images by Dutch masters that strike at the heart and are linked with a direct thread to social initiatives: Erik Hijweege's striking portraits of albino boys and Jeroen Van Loon's reportage on cancer patients, with black and white images and a pitiless use of light that cannot leave one indifferent.
In the midst of this panorama of visual art that is almost never an end in itself, Leni Frau's images fit in perfectly, with her gaze on the women of the Dandora rubbish dump, the largest and most degraded in Africa. Images documenting the photographer's journey with the workers who collect rubbish and live in conditions of total degradation. Her black and white, only minimally retouched in postproduction, becomes a mirror of a reality experienced by the Marche photographer, walking with the "wate pickers" under the scorching midday sun (now repudiated by photographers, because of the perpendicular light) in a terribly surreal landscape, amidst unbreathable air and conditions bordering on the human, where the clichés of those who simply see the unjust are overturned.
Shots that cannot leave one indifferent, within a collective that must be seen.
Ubuntu will continue to be on view at the Ardhi Gallery (Ole Sangale Link Road, every day except Monday, from 10 am to 8 pm.
Free entrance.