Welcome to the New Year in the art world. Galleries are beginning to open and new shows are being installed. Scroll through for the latest art events, openings and exhibitions iN Nairobi.

EVENTS & OPENINGS

Experimental Weaving Workshop | NCAI | Friday 9 January | 2pm

An experimental weaving workshop led by Ndung’u Mbithi and the final workshop of the NCAI x MUNYU exhibition, ‘Between Signals.’ This is an immersive session exploring intuitive weaving, unconventional materials, and process-led making. The workshop approaches weaving as a meditative practice, prioritizing exploration over outcome. Through play, conversation, and collaboration at the loom, we’ll blur the lines between art-making and personal expression. Participants will also learn the basics of weaving, loom preparation, and how to repurpose and recycle fabric into yarn for weaving.

About the facilitator:
Ndung’u Mbithi is a Nairobi-based multidisciplinary artist and musician whose practice spans weaving, installation, painting, and embroidery.

Limited spaces available, sign up via the registration link  to secure your spot.

Discussion: What is Community Based Art? With Jamey Ponte | HoF Gallery | Saturday 10 January | 2pm

Learn about two significant efforts planned for 2026 while discussing the concept of community based art. All are welcome.

Cacti: A Visual Protest | Rasha Al Jundi with Micahel Jabareen | Munyu Space | Opening 14 January | Artists’ Talk 17 January, 2pm | Until 24 January

Is Germany the same as Deutschland? What is the relationship between German colonial history, current colonial legacy and its role in funding the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine? How does Germany market itself as the cradle for opportunities, freedom of expression and preservation of personal privacy? How does the German memory industry contribute to the country’s colonial behavior? Ousmane Sembene is famously filmed stating: “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts. My future does not depend on Europe. Why be a sunflower and turn towards the sun? I myself am the sun!”

Heaven can Wait – Michael Soi | Untold Stories – Evans Mbugua | Circle Art Gallery | Opening Wednesday 21 January | Until 25 February

As Circle Gallery expands their space to comprise two gallery rooms, they present new shows by Michael Soi and Evans Mbugua respectively.
Soi’s practice is well to known to function as a visual diary of Nairobi, offering sharp satirical commentary on the city’s social, economic, and political realities. His work examines relationships – intergenerational, interracial, and transactional – what he describes as the economics of love. Themes of commercial sex work, popular culture, globalization, and consumerism recur as lenses through which he interrogates contemporary urban life.
Untold Stories is part of the ongoing research Evans Mbugua has pursued for more than a decade around questions of identity and memory, through portraits of people drawn from his everyday environment.  This intensely personal work explores his familial line in relation to the building of a young Keyna, working with both glass painting and stained glass. A Kenyan based in Paris, France, Mbugua’s work has gained international recognition and has been presented in numerous gallery exhibitions and art fairs across Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. This will be his first exhibition in Nairobi for many years.

ONGOING EXHIBITIONS

Between Signals | Group Exhibition | NCAI | Extended into January

The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) and Munyu Space present “Between Signals,” a collaborative exhibition,

Between Signals presents artistic practices that activate and challenge the spaces between analog and digital, perception and presence. Through immersive installations that engage light, sound, scent, texture, and time, the exhibition traces the in-between worlds where sensory and cognitive understanding is negotiated, inviting audiences to actively sense and reflect on their surrounding environments and experiences.

Curated by munyu, the exhibition brings together works by artists: Awuor Onyango, Kevo Stero, Kamwangi Njue, Kimani Sam K., Chela Yego, Cynthia Nyakiro, Muthoni ni Mimi, Natasha Khanyola, Anthony Muisyo, Sophia Bauer, Sound of Nairobi, James Kamande, Wakianda, Joy Mala, Ndung’u Mbithi, Adam Yawe and Tizzita Tefera.

We Belong to Time | Tiemar Tegene & Angdaye Lemma | Circle Art Gallery | Extended to 15 January

In We Belong to Time, printmaking becomes a language of transformation. Through transfer, layering, and pigment, Tiemar Tegene and Engdaye Lemma trace the ways emotion and experience leave their marks. Tiemar’s works move with the unpredictability of feeling – love, regret, and memory shifting like weather – while Engdaye’s prints echo the city’s restless pulse, its constant becoming. Together, their practices reveal time not as something we possess, but something that possesses us: each impression, each trace, a reminder that creation itself is a record of time passing through matter.

Cultural Tapestries: Threads of Pan-African Identity | Curated by Sena Art Gallery | Nairobi National Museum, Creativity Gallery | Until 25 January

Sena Art Gallery is proud to close the year with a powerful celebration of emerging voices from across the continent, bringing together artists from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, and Nigeria—each weaving their own stories, histories, and identities into one vibrant Pan-African narrative, unveiling a dynamic group exhibition that honours the richness, diversity, and dialogue of contemporary African creativity.

I.N.N.A.T.E.L.Y N.A.T.U.R.E | She’Rustica | Two Grapes | End date TBD

She’Rustica By Design creates functional artistry and spatial design. I create bespoke, functional art and installation art
from discarded material, that embodies a blended rustic aesthetic. She’Rustica’s art is the result of a process of imagining and creating a delicate soft beauty from a rough and rigid world. Intentionally crossing the realm of physicality to invoke a state of introspection; to ask yourself, “What is my little thing?”. During the duration of the showcase there will be live interactions with the artist – keep an eye on socials @twograpes & @she’rustica plus @in.nairobi for details.

See Also
The New Migration | Humpback Whale Safaris in Kenya

 

Rashid Amin | One Off Gallery | Opening Saturday 29 November | Until 18 January 2026

My work is an exploration of this fragile, essential connection and a quiet lament for the harmony we have broken. Using charcoal and soft pastels, I draw the human form and organic shapes, a figure that echoes the curve of a river. These are not just drawings, they are wishes, visual prayers for a symbiosis we’ve forgotten. The smudged edges and blending tones are deliberate, suggesting that our boundaries with the natural world are not hard lines, but permeable breathing spaces. – Rashid Amin

Kahare Miano | One Off Gallery | Opening Saturday 29 November | Until 18 January 2026

The show carries on where the last left off, with the triple themes of ‘Landscape Matters’, he has then added the themes of ‘Treasured Totems’ and ‘Memory, Betrayal and Dispossession’.  Miano calls himself an engaged student of architecture and design, ‘immersed in the kitchen’ of learning.  Like all Professors, the acquisition of knowledge never ceases, whilst all the while he has been fighting a savage illness. Miano confronts many historical and controversial issues with a deep understanding of line and form.

A Lot Has Happened | Ian Gichohi | Paper Cafe X The Good Grain | Until 31 January 2026

A Lot Has Happened by Ian Gichohi brings together five years of photographic experiments attending to the image itself and the surface that holds it with equal attention. In his studio notes, Gichohi writes of the process – looking without to better understand the noise within, and with this eye develops individual images and assemblages that are altogether quiet, meditative and honest.

Land, Politics & Ownership | The African Arts Trust | Until 28 February 2026

Land, Politics, and Ownership’ is an interdisciplinary project that interrogates the visual culture and contested realities of contemporary Addis Ababa through history. The collaborative practice of curator and artist Dagim Abebe and artist Natnael Ashebir navigates the tension between official historical archives and the intimate, often-erased archives of personal memory and lived experience. They employ a material language of texture, collage, and assembled media, using charcoal, soil, photographs, and printmaking techniques like image transfer and silkscreen. This approach makes the politics of space not just visible, but tangible, inviting viewers to physically and emotionally engage with the weight of displacement and the fragile acts of protection that define the modern urban landscape.

Wahenga Wa Sanaa | Nairobi National Museum | Until 2027

Wahenga wa Sanaa: Tracing two centuries of artistic legacy 1800 – 1980

Wahenga wa Sanaa brings the NMK collection into public view, tracing powerful themes of cultural identity, spirituality, history and politics, nature and environment, and the growth of formal art training and supporting institutions. The exhibition honours the Wahenga—the wise ancestors and cultural forebearers whose creativity laid the foundation for generations of artists. As we create art today, we walk in their footsteps and continue to build on their enduring legacy. The exhibition is funded by the Kenya Museum Society. Read more about the exhibition in our article.