Miyale Ya Blue
Cyrus Kabiru Kenyan
Kabiru was born in Nairobi's Korogorocho, a neighborhood that borders the city's largest garbage dump. As a child, he began creatively reusing the materials he salvaged, giving potentially obsolete items new meaning. Part of a recent series, Miyale Ya Blue is one of the many transistor radios the artist has retrofitted. In an era when music and other media have migrated online, for Kabiru these objects not only elicit memories of gathering around his grandmother's wireless to hear the news of the day but also are imbued with ancestral, spiritual powers that transport one imaginatively through space and time. The details on this piece evoke the warming rays of the sun (miyale in Swahili).
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