West, London
Velma Rosai-Makhandia
To Witness! The Strange, the Numinous
Union PacificIt is rare to witness that which lives, most naturally, in the space between a speaker and their listener. In the otherworldly works of Velma Rosai-Makhandia, this witnessing of folklore, passed through familial archives and personal narrative, is made tangible. Drawing from time spent in Kenya, Benin, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Mexico, the ephemeral works of Rosai-Makhandia move between the ethereal and the earthly, using water, fire, sky, and land as vessels for folklores of intermediaries and thresholds, of the seen and the unseen swaying alongside one another. To stand before them is to witness folklore as performance and as telling, maintaining the immanence of living tradition; narratives are left intact, embodied, and undiminished. Witnessed together, the works in To Witness! The Strange, the Numinous, draw a map of the spiritual, charting the ways different cultures have understood and tended their relationship with the unseen forces that move beneath life, memory, and the surface of the everyday; beneath everything that cannot be put into words. Velma Rosai-Makhandia (b. 1986, Nairobi, Kenya) is a student of the stars. Her effervescent paintings and textile works draw on numinous, dreamlike imagery to evoke celestial and otherworldly realms, where figures converge in scenes of whimsical flight, enigmatic fellowship, and journeys through subterranean worlds. Rendered in vibrant, translucent washes of colour, her practice influences are situated in African mythology, superstitions, elemental forces, and personal narrative – threads she weaves into expansive visual ethereal worlds that transcend the boundaries of reality.