By Joy Odondi Mala
Swift9 and the Sacred Graffiti as Archive
There is nothing passive about the work of Swift9. It does not sit still; it moves even while fixed to walls. His art brims with kinetic energy; energetic, experimental, and strange. From pigment that refuses containment, to iconography that disrupts, and textures and cyberpunk glows of color that pull you in. Famed as one of the godfathers of Kenyan graffiti, Swift has been a force within Nairobi’s urban art scene for over two decades. His “G Shock Style” is a skill defining not just a technique, but an ethos: dynamic, layered, and insurgent. His practice traces its roots to humble beginnings as a sign writer, airbrushing matatus at the height of the wave that brought about Nairobi’s Matatu culture, as well as murals and graffiti work, and extensive teaching and mentoring of upcoming artists. In a city that is constantly shifting, building, demolishing, and rebuilding itself, Swift9’s graffiti stands as both a mirror and a counterforce. It records, questions, and mythologizes.
Ssango 2, Spray paint & acrylics on canvas 2019
Graffiti has long occupied the in-between: between public and private, sacred and profane, permanence and impermanence. Swift not only embraces this liminality, but he also makes it his atelier. His choice of materials is telling: from canvas to reused sacks, spray cans, papyrus, and makuti mats. The work forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time, change, and chance. Each material absorbs pigment differently, creating backgrounds that already resist homogeneity. The surface is never neutral. He begins with layers of color, setting backdrops of abstract forms long before representation emerges, treating pigment itself as a kind of pre-memory. What results are works that hold time differently, bearing witness while refusing closure.
His pieces traverse continents, from the streets of Nairobi to walls in Australia, Berlin, New York, Detroit, Sweden, Cincinnati, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, to name a few. And yet, they always carry the trace of home, representing a cultural custodian. His mural at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in Australia, for example, celebrates urban culture but also subtly codes it through a Nairobi lens, insisting that African aesthetic intelligence is central, not peripheral, to global narratives. When asked, he says that he draws upon the ancient as much as the contemporary, tracing graffiti’s lineage back to cave paintings and even to the biblical “writing on the wall,” aligning this often-dismissed form with sacred warning, prophecy, and resistance.
My Errors Are Correct, Spray paint on makuti 2020
The core of graffiti is rebellion, and this rebellion runs through his work, not just politically, but materially. Swift rebels against conformity, against the neat boxes of art categorization: fine art versus street art, high versus low, masculine versus feminine. His use of pressurized air is both practical and poetic; spray paint becomes breath, invocation, a way of making the invisible visible. He resists the density and viscosity of traditional paint mediums, opting instead for something more immediate, more ephemeral, and thus, more alive.
In this curatorial work, Joy Mala views Swift’s art as steeped in the decolonial project. In this exhibition, InterDimensionals: Bodies as Homes, his work engages with broader questions about how Black and African bodies are portrayed, constrained, and liberated. Graffiti, in his hands, becomes a philosophical tool and an instrument that ruptures colonial narratives inscribed on flesh. The bodies in his work do not perform; they exist. They grieve, transform, protect, and reclaim. The phrase ‘the eyes are windows to the soul’ is sometimes literally demonstrated in his portraiture works, where he uses vibrant flower blooms or symbols to both obscure the eyes and reveal the soul, inviting us to look beyond sight, into the soul. The soul, here, is not metaphorical. It is the genesis and the point of origin.
Passing Glance, Spray paint on canvas 2024
Swift’s studio reflects this same ethic: ever-shifting, alive, a kind of living organism. It is part archive, part altar. I often joke—half-serious— that his work is his way of “Kuturoga” (bewitching), and indeed it does, not with trickery, but with depth. With the way it reorganizes space and time. His subjects are both visual and visceral, carrying the weight of personal anguish, collective memory, chosen solitude, and ancestral presence.
Curated within a larger inquiry of decolonizing the human form, this exhibition positions Swift’s work as a critical intervention. What does it mean to reclaim the body not as territory but as home? To shun the rigidities projected on masculinity and the subjugations burdening femininity? Through these works, we encounter the body as archive, as resistance, and ultimately, as a place of becoming. The streets become sacred canvases. The spray can, a ritual. The body, reimagined, is not only seen—it is honored.
As you commune with these works, do not simply look. Listen. Let the layers speak. Let the textures pull you in. There are stories beneath stories here; Questions folded into pigment. The exhibition is about what has been made and about what it dares to unmake.
Interdimensionals: Bodies at Home | Swift9 | Munyu Space | Until 24 June