munyu, in collaboration with ARCH+, presents The Great Repair: umunyu, a major international exhibition exploring repair as a transformative social, ecological, and cultural practice.
The exhibition brings together artists, architects, designers, researchers, and community practitioners from Kenya and around the world to examine how acts of care, maintenance, resistance, and rebuilding can shape more just and egalitarian futures.
The Great Repair: umunyu seeks to create space for critical reflection on how societies respond to crisis, loss, extraction, and inequality. By foregrounding practices of care, stewardship, maintenance, and collective imagination, the exhibition asks a timely question: What does it mean to repair a world in constant transition?
The exhibition explores the contradictions between growth and ecology through the material culture of architecture. It presents positions from art and architecture as well as spatial practices in which repair becomes tangible as a new societal and design paradigm. Through spatial discourse, processes and places of maintenance and care are made visible and suggest new norms and values for living together.
Originally conceived by ARCH+ (Christian Hiller, Felix Hofmann, Markus Krieger, Alex Nehmer, Anh-Linh Ngo) with Prof. Milica Topalovic (ETH Zurich), and Prof. Florian Hertweck (University of Luxembourg), in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste, The Great Repair has previously been presented at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and the Form/Design Center in Malmö.
The Nairobi edition, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, marks the project’s first presentation in Africa and has been developed in close dialogue with munyu, a Nairobi-based platform for individual and collective artistic and interdisciplinary practice, shaped by artists and affiliated practitioners.
Since the start of the project, The Great Repair, in 2022, we have observed how authoritarianism, militarization, and reactionary parochialism are gaining ground where we live in the North. At the same time, care for the climate and biodiversity loss has become subdued here, where the home of the historic carbon burden lies… With care, weak links strengthen, and from there grow into a powerful resource to collectively enact repair across boundaries. It is a practice that starts by noticing, acknowledging, and then supporting the struggles for repair already taking place all around us every day, rather than replacing them.”
– ARCH+ Team (Markus Krieger, Felix Hofmann, Christian Hiller)
Drawing on the concept of munyu – a traditional salt produced from the ashes of plant matter and embedded in everyday systems of care, sustenance, and resourcefulness – the Nairobi iteration introduces umunyu as a methodology that engages with material that is present in everyday life and a system of production that is embedded within this way of living.
Through this framework, repair is exploratively broadened and signified as a state of being, active processes or practices that are accessible and commonplace. It calls for the anticipatory consideration and calibration of space, time and the conditions of living, aiming for transformation rather than the return to previous states of being. While alluding to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the Great-ness in the exhibition title refers to a multitude of reparative practices rather than prescribing a universal, all-encompassing policy.
Artists Selection and Public programming
The exhibition, curated in dialogue between munyu and ARCH+, features a selection of works from previous editions of The Great Repair alongside newly commissioned and locally situated contributions. Participating artists and collectives include
Limbo Accra | Omi Collective and Mogasam | Kader Attia | Atelier Bow-Wow & Tsukamoto Laboratory of the Tokyo Institute of
Technology | Cave Bureau | Manuel Chavajay | Jonathan Fraser | Kairos Futura: Abdul Rop & Daniel Nuru |Prof. Florian Hertweck with Hamza Haidam and Julia Anna Paszkot | Sam Hopkins | Dr. Makau Kitata & Prof. Kenny Cupers | Dr. Margaret Ngima Macharia Kedogo | PEARLS Project | Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser | Lutivini Majanja | Anthony Muisyo | Dr. Lydia Muthuma | James Muriuki | Mũthoni Mwangi & Rosie Olang | Sheila Nakitende, Sharon Neema, Marjetica Potrč | Bas Princen | Social Justice Centres Travelling Theatre | Center for Spatial Technology | Mierle Laderman Ukeles | Wajukuu Artists’ Collective: Shabu Mwangi & Ngugi Waweru | Khalid Yuutdem.
Accompanying the exhibition, a public programme, funded by the Agency for International Museum Cooperation, titled Umunyu: Acts of Repair will unfold throughout the exhibition period, and across a range of venues in Nairobi. The programme will feature talks, workshops, excursions, performances, screenings, artist-led walks, community engagements, and public conversations that expand the exhibition’s themes aiming to broaden civic and cultural discourse. Topics will include rethinking museums, decolonisation, environmental justice, maintenance and mending, urban transformation, collective memory, and speculative futures.
At the opening ceremony on 30 July Antonia Kihara will offer a keynote presentation that reflects on Gikuyu cosmologies as a lens through which to think about repair. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems, the presentation explores relational understandings of land, ancestry, reciprocity, and collective responsibility, inviting audiences to consider repair as an ongoing practice of renewing relationships between people, place, and the world we leave behind for the coming generations.
The Great Repair: umunyu | Munyu – basement and mezzanine of The Mall, Westlands |
31 July – 25 October 2026 | Opening Ceremony 30 July 2026, 5:00 PM
Opening Hours
Tuesday – Saturday: 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM. Closed on Sundays and Mondays.
Admission: Free
Associated events include:
31st July 2026: Under Construction: Museums as Process – National Museum of Kenya
In a panel conversation with Jim Chuchu, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Dr. Anna Szöke, Dr. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, moderated by Dr. Mshai Mwangola, we will consider how museums are responding to changing understandings of cultural heritage; how architecture shapes conditions for access, encounter, and participation; how institutions engage with living cultural practices; and what forms of collaboration are emerging between museums, cities, communities, and cultural practitioners.
1st Aug 2026: Mural Presentation, Community Gathering And Dialogue – Wajukuu Arts Collective
A collaboration between Marjetica Potrč, Primož Novak, and Wajukuu Artist Collective. Marjetica Potrč’s works propose a new, egalitarian coexistence between humans and the natural world, in which we not only understand and accept our interconnectedness but also consolidate this relationship through law. Alongside the mural presentation, Wajukuu Artists Collective will host a community gathering dedicated to reflecting on the stories, challenges, and future of our ecology and the community’s coexistence.
2nd Aug 2026: Monument walk – Nairobi CBD
In Dr. Lydia Muthuma’s Monument Walks, she takes us on a journey through Nairobi’s CBD. As the administrative centre of the country, the monuments present here speak to the history of Kenya’s crafted National identity. She reveals the subtle details that speak to the priorities of the powers that erected them, and invites us to consider what this means for us in the present.
Follow @munyu_space for more updates and artist/participant information.