Photography | Curation
Joel Lukhovi is a Kenyan based visual artist working primarily with lens-based media. In his contact with photography, he has since ventured successfully into multiple forms of the medium. While attending engineering at the University of Nairobi, his artistry fascination offered him an opportunity to pursue Literature Studies at the same University.
Joel through photography and literature continues to be in a unique position to respond, visualize and interpret the world around him creatively grappling with social, cultural, political and personal topics. He explores space of memory and other representation. He has since incorporated a contextual approach in his creations. His work imagines transitions and parallels of society and the meanings of the ever-changing spaces.
Joel is currently completing a fellowship at Sasa Nairobi Artist Fellowship 2024/25 facilitated by Goethe Institut – Kenya. His work takes a close look at the linkage between photography, the archive and the ways in which the two influence our perception and the understanding of histories and self. It explores diverse happenings with photo albums as preferred ways of interpretation in relieving insights about family life in the 21st century. Besides, interrelation of space and matter remain a focal point to examine history through the visual language of family photographs.
This comes to address formations and deconstructions as to what makes an image derive its meaning. Archival records brings to light a set of materials; that give photographs purpose of existence. His work now takes a form of social commentary, covering patterns of everyday life. Often a time, they are references of self-discovery or rather imagined experiments.
By attending art and curatorial residencies and workshops in Nairobi and abroad, a growing aspect of his practice is the ability to curate interventions that promote exchanges across traditional and modern platforms. His use of shapes, objects and patterns become visual elements that define his work.
In 2016 at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) Joel explored together with other artists, the politics of food, ways food has, and continues to form, and give shape to multiple, contradictory, sensorial experiences of and insights into urban living. Later, together with ten artists, he exhibited Frontiers of the Present curated by James Muriuki at Circle Art gallery.
To this present, he is working on a duo project – African Cityzens – a transcontinental photography movement exploring trans city journeys and spatial exchanges. The emphasis of the duo collective allows the artist to engage and create works that often reflect individual approaches into new spaces. The artists confront the physical, political and emotional aspects of home. Integral to the exhibition is the exploration of community. The in-movement project has traveled across eastern and southern Africa regions with a special presentation at the 2017 Lagos Photo Festival.
Joel employs emphasis on the importance of technique, process and presentation of his work. In 2023; Image & Exploration showcased family archival work at Goethe Institut that informed of the life and journey of photo albums with a personal feel. It explored the purpose and role of photographs in an African family setting. Besides, it aimed at formulating alternative ways through which photographic material may be approached as evidence of histories.
His work is activated by the power of identity and the shifting currents of social dialogue. Whereas it encourages viewers to reflect on their own consumption habits and the impact of globalization on local communities. By defining primary modes of representation that characterize conceptual styles of photography, Joel Lukhovi looks at the promise of a rather better picture.
In 2024, Joel completed a month-long curatorial residency program at FOAM museum of photography in Amsterdam with focus on African photography. This residency looked at curatorial techniques in contemporary times that merge memories, shape the present and redirect the future. Still in 2024, Joel contributed as a guest lecturer for an international block seminar at KaTHO – NRW University in Paderborn, Germany where he taught on family photo albums and their social role in collaboration with Paderborn City Archives.
In Othering & Otherness 2024 at Raum fur Kunst, Paderborn Joel asks, how can one make the making of photography look? Imagining and making is a practice that grows out of inquiry and the actual forming. Joel shares his deepest thoughts in picture formats as he questions results from the making. Here the artist examines its evolution while relating the movement to historical and cultural contexts that have emerged.
His solo exhibition Own Form 2018 organized by Afrikultur at the Multicultural Center in Stockholm explored precious reflections of matter and unexpected ideas of unlearning. This photographic work remains a permanent collection of the organization. In 2015, over a month-long residency between Zurich and Konstanz, Joel exhibited a set of 50 photographs at the Theatre Konstanz in Germany. The works remain a collection of the theatre to date.
Lukhovi’s work continues to be shown extensively and collected widely. His contribution to the art community is included in several publications in Africa and Europe. He continues to collaborate with artists, educators and cultural institutions extensively. He is a global recipient of the Intercultural Encounters, organized by the ministry of Foreign Affairs & International Cooperation – Republic of Austria.