French contemporary art space 193 Gallery will mark its first appearance at India Art Fair 2026 with a solo presentation of Kenyan artist Thandiwe Muriu, introducing her internationally acclaimed photographic series CAMO to Indian audiences. The gallery will showcase Muriu’s works at Booth F04, in what it describes as the opening of “a new chapter of cross-cultural exchange between Africa, Europe and South Asia.”
For India Art Fair, Muriu presents key works from CAMO alongside two new pieces created especially for the New Delhi showcase. The series, which has travelled widely across Europe and the United States, is being positioned at the fair as a point of entry into conversations around identity, visibility and the role of women in contemporary African societies—threads that resonate strongly across the global South.
Born in Nairobi in 1990, Muriu examines themes of identity, culture and female empowerment through meticulously staged photographic portraits. Her images are instantly recognisable: women enveloped in saturated fields of Ankara wax and East African kanga textiles, their bodies and garments almost dissolving into patterned backdrops. Within this near-camouflage, sculptural hairstyles and improvised accessories made from everyday household objects like bottle caps, combs, brushes, mosquito coils emerge as powerful visual anchors.
This strategy of “camouflage and apparition” underpins CAMO, her debut artistic series. Using historical Ankara textiles as a kind of living architecture, Muriu explores how women appear, disappear and assert themselves within social expectations. The works operate on multiple registers: as optic games that recall the traditions of Op Art, as tributes to African studio portraiture in the lineage of Malick Sidibé, and as incisive reflections on who is seen and how.
Image Courtesy: © Thandiwe Muriu, Courtesy of 193 Gallery
Muriu’s practice is deeply rooted in material and oral traditions from Kenya. Ankara and kanga are not mere decorative motifs in her compositions; they function as carriers of memory and social history, textiles that “bridge socioeconomic divides and connect people across Africa, Europe, and Asia.” By pairing her images with African proverbs, she draws on the region’s story-telling heritage to “protect communal memory against the erosion of time,” treating each work as both visual statement and cultural archive.
Her own biography threads through the work. A self-taught photographer in a country that lacked formal photography schools, Muriu began experimenting with the camera at 14, turned professional by 17, and completed her first solo advertising campaign at 23. Building a career in Kenya’s male-dominated advertising industry pushed her to question gendered labour, the limits of “women’s work” and the pressures placed on women’s ambitions—questions that crystallised into CAMO and its focus on strong, unsmiling, self-possessed Black female protagonists.
Despite beginning her artistic career only in 2020, Muriu has quickly gained institutional recognition. Her works are held in public and private collections including the UNESCO Collection, the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection, the Peter & Carla Schulting Collection, Photo Elysée in Lausanne and the Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire. She has been commissioned by Longchamp, the United Nations, Apple and the Swiss Red Cross, and in 2024 published her monograph Camo with Chronicle Books.
On the exhibition circuit, Muriu’s photographs have featured prominently in shows that probe image-making, fashion and Black subjectivity. Recent highlights include the collateral event Passengers in Transit at the 60th Venice Biennale (presented by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos in collaboration with 193 Gallery), a solo exhibition I Am Because You Are at New York University’s Gallatin Galleries, and participation in FEMMES! at Perrotin Gallery, curated by Pharrell Williams. Her works have also been seen at Musée de l’Homme in Paris (WAX!), Museum Folkwang in Essen (Grow It, Show It! A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok), and the Biennale Della Fotografia Femminile in Mantua.
193 Gallery’s decision to stage her India Art Fair debut as a focused presentation aligns with the gallery’s broader mission. Founded in 2018 and based in Paris, Venice and Saint-Tropez, the gallery has built its program around what it calls “a global tour of contemporary art,” with a sustained emphasis on art scenes from the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, Southeast and South Asia. Its participation in fairs such as Untitled Miami, Arco Madrid, Zona Maco, Paris Photo, KIAF Seoul and 1-54 in Marrakech, New York and London has been framed as a way to foreground Southern perspectives within a still predominantly Western art market.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
