An old radio can still hold the memory of people gathering to hear it. A bicycle without wheels can still carry a father’s promise. A pair of glasses can turn a face into a different character, even when the lenses have no conventional purpose. Cyrus Kabiru makes art at the point where an object’s former use remains visible but no longer sets the limit of what it can become. The materials come from the streets and workshops of Nairobi and from the other places he visits. The future in his work does not arrive in a sealed box. It is assembled from things whose previous lives have not entirely ended.
Kabiru calls his practice Afrofuturist, though he resists giving it a single cultural identity. In a first-person conversation with The Safari Collection, he described carrying discarded materials from different countries in his suitcase and letting them enter his work. For him, the term can describe a meeting of cultures through material as much as an image of outer space. A piece of waste may have crossed borders before he handles it. Its new form holds traces of that journey without needing to explain every stage. What matters is the artist’s capacity to give it another role.
Born in Nairobi’s Korogocho, beside a large dump, Kabiru began making objects from what he could find. The Metropolitan Museum of Art connects his childhood practice of salvaging material with his later sculptural work. Kabiru’s own accounts make this proximity more than a convenient origin story. He has described wanting to give discarded things a second chance. The wish becomes a working method: select an object, study its weight and associations, then alter it until it can face an audience in another guise. He often wears the results himself, which makes the artist’s body one of the sites where an object changes status.
An instrument for a different face
The C-Stunners are Kabiru’s best-known series. They are sculptural eyewear made from salvaged components, then worn in portraits in which he looks back at the camera. SMAC Gallery’s 2015 exhibition account describes the photographs as part of the work, not merely records of objects placed on a shelf. In one moment the glasses are constructions of metal and other found fragments. In the next they frame an expression, interrupt the familiar geometry of a face and help create a character. The artist’s own distinction is sharp: he says making the glasses and wearing them leave him feeling like different people.
That transformation depends on the closeness of sculpture to skin. Ordinary spectacles are generally expected to improve sight while disappearing as much as possible from the wearer’s field of vision. Kabiru’s pieces insist on being noticed. They can enlarge the apparent size of the eyes, cover them or send lines and shapes outward from the face. The viewer may be unable to tell at first whether the object is an aid, a disguise, a machine or an ornament. The uncertainty is the point. The eye that looks through the artwork and the eye that looks at it occupy different positions, each aware of the elaborate frame between them.
The portraits deepen the exchange. A freestanding pair of glasses can be admired for construction, but the photograph asks what happens when someone claims the object as part of an identity. SMAC notes that Kabiru’s straight-faced poses vary in mood. One portrait may appear approachable, another severe. The expressive change is not contained in the eyewear alone; it comes from its encounter with his posture, gaze and the camera. This is why reducing the series to a neat message about recycling would miss its formal achievement. Found material becomes a tool for performance. The performer returns the gaze directed at him and refuses to remain a specimen of ingenious poverty.
Individual pieces have names, including Cassette and Face to Face, pictured in the Safari Collection interview. Their titles suggest Kabiru’s interest in technologies of communication and encounter. Yet the series is not built from a single recipe. A component that once belonged to a domestic device may sit next to something from the street. The maker’s choices about symmetry, balance and fastening decide whether the assemblage can hold near a face, whether it projects a sharp outline, and how its shadows alter a portrait. The work asks for the close attention normally given to fine jewellery while keeping the prior life of its materials in view.
Kabiru traces the first impulse toward eyewear to a story told by his father, who had damaged glasses as a child. He later made his own versions from scrap. In the Nataal interview, he remembered exchanging homemade spectacles for help with schoolwork and experimenting with cutlery and bottle tops. The memory is not a claim that the mature series was inevitable. It shows an early recognition that an object worn on the face could change social relations. What began as play and barter became a sustained inquiry into visibility: who is seen, through which frame, and with what authority to invent a new one?
A bicycle after its journey
The Black Mamba works move from the face to a vehicle. The black fixed-gear bicycle was once common in Kenya, valued for its affordability and utility. SMAC’s exhibition text explains that Kabiru dismantled and reimagined such bicycles as sculptural constructions while motorcycles and scooters were altering the urban streetscape. He has also made a film titled The Death of Black Mamba. Where the C-Stunners act on a wearer’s appearance, the bicycles carry the memory of how bodies, goods and families moved through a city.
For Kabiru that memory is personal. In the Nataal conversation, he remembered his father working from a bicycle with an extended seat, carrying goods through Nairobi. His father promised him one if he performed well, then gave him a damaged bicycle without wheels and left him to repair it. Another recollection involves washing every spoke and wire after a day’s work. Such details give the Black Mamba sculptures a harder texture than a general celebration of upcycling. A bicycle can mean freedom and labour at once. It can be a gift, a test, a livelihood and an exhausting chore. Kabiru’s constructions draw on that complexity rather than polishing it away.
A bicycle is a notably legible machine. Its triangular frame, paired wheels and chain tell a viewer how motion would occur, even before anyone rides it. Dismantling that arrangement makes the promise of movement unstable. A wheel can remain a circle while losing its partnership with the other wheel. A frame can retain the outline of a vehicle while no longer being able to transport a rider. Kabiru’s sculptural versions do not need to be judged by roadworthiness. Their interrupted functions let the viewer inspect a machine that everyday use has made almost invisible.
Nataal describes one Black Mamba construction that resembles a cannon made with a car exhaust. The shift from vehicle to weapon is visually abrupt but materially intelligible. Both devices direct force along a line; both can make a loud entrance into public space. Kabiru linked that form to his concern about armed conflict in the region and beyond. The bicycle no longer simply commemorates a beloved old mode of travel. It also asks where a society’s technical resources and political energy are being directed. The sculpture’s provocative silhouette makes a question out of the same metal that once served daily transportation.
The 2015 Cape Town exhibition brought C-Stunners and Black Mambas together. Placing them side by side reveals a change in scale without abandoning Kabiru’s method. The glasses reorganize the face, the bicycle reorganizes the city’s memory. One is worn; the other is recalled as something ridden or pushed. Both start with an object whose former use is plain enough for the viewer to recognize. The art begins when that use no longer fully explains what stands before us. Kabiru does not erase the past of a material in order to imagine a future for it.
A radio that carries voices
A third body of work turns to radios. The Met’s Afrofuturist Period Room includes Kabiru’s Miyale Ya Blue (2020), a transistor radio rebuilt with steel and found objects. The museum’s account connects the series to his memory of sitting near his grandmother’s wireless to hear the news. It also describes the radios as carriers of ancestral and spiritual association. The title uses the Swahili word miyale, referring to rays of sunlight, which the museum sees evoked in the object’s details. Its physical form and remembered sound belong to different times, but the artwork brings them into the same room.
A transistor radio is small enough to travel and public enough to gather listeners. One person can hold it; several can share what comes through it. That dual character makes it an apt vessel for Kabiru’s interest in social memory. The voice of an absent speaker once arrived through a simple box, turning distance into an audible presence. In a museum the retrofitted radio may be silent, yet its recognizable shape can call back the habit of listening. The artist’s intervention does not restore an earlier household scene. It opens a route from that scene toward an imagined capacity for travel through time.
The Met’s period room is especially suited to this object because the installation asks visitors to think about how ordinary possessions preserve lives and conjure futures. Kabiru’s radio does not have to perform as a functioning broadcast device to matter there. It needs to hold the tension between an obsolete medium and the enduring desire to hear voices beyond the immediate room. Metal and found fragments give the remembered appliance a new surface. A gallery visitor sees the radio as sculpture while being invited to think of a grandmother’s home, a news bulletin and a child learning that a small object can carry a wider world.
Its title brings warmth into a work whose materials could otherwise seem cold. Sunlight is not a computer effect in the museum account. It is an everyday force translated into metal form and language. That relation helps distinguish Kabiru’s Afrofuturism from a narrow technological spectacle. He is interested in devices, but also in what people did with them, whom they gathered, what they remembered and how a discarded casing might hold those associations. The radio can be old in its mechanism and open toward the future in its new imaginative use.
The life of a found thing
Kabiru’s working materials are often summarized as rubbish, a word that describes their discarded status but little of their character. Scrap metal differs from a keyboard key; a bottle cap differs from a radio casing. Each asks for a different kind of joining and carries a different memory of use. In the Safari Collection interview, Kabiru described making the work slowly and gently, almost as a conversation with the objects. Their surfaces are not uniformly new or clean. Age and wear become part of the sculpture’s vocabulary. He does not need to disguise the material’s history to give it a new one.
That attitude also complicates the language of environmental virtue frequently attached to found-object art. Recycling matters in a city where consumption leaves visible heaps of material, but Kabiru’s transformations are not instructions for municipal waste management. The objects become singular artworks through decisions about balance, proportion and performance. A piece of scrap is not inherently expressive because it was rescued. It becomes expressive when the artist sees what its former function, texture and shape can do in a new relationship. He gives the material a second chance by taking its possibilities seriously.
His account of carrying waste from many countries adds another layer. An object found in Nairobi may have been manufactured elsewhere; an object brought back in a suitcase has an even more obvious route across borders. Kabiru sees that mixture as part of his Afrofuturism. The sculpture may hold materials from different economies and cultures without forcing them into a tidy symbol of global unity. The joins remain visible. Each component has arrived through particular systems of making, buying, using and discarding. The finished work makes a new connection while leaving those systems open to thought.
The artist’s self-taught practice is equally important to the work’s character. The glasses, bicycles and radios did not emerge from an established medium with stable rules. Each series required him to learn what a component could withstand, how it could be held together, and what sort of image or performance would complete it. The results can look playful, but play here involves exact attention to material. A portrait fails if a frame cannot sit on the face. A bicycle sculpture loses force if it no longer recalls the vehicle it transforms. A radio loses its charge if its old capacity for transmission becomes wholly unrecognizable.
Kabiru’s international exhibitions have carried this Nairobi practice into very different settings. He appeared in the 2015 Making Africa exhibition at Vitra Design Museum and in Africa: Architecture and Identity at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, according to Nataal’s account. Those appearances do not relocate the origins of the work. They show how its questions travel. A visitor in Humlebæk may know nothing of a Kenyan black mamba bicycle, yet can grasp the altered relationship between a familiar machine and a remembered way of living. The work rewards learning the local history rather than relying only on the general appeal of inventive scrap.
A future seen at close range
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial imagines possible Congolese futures through photography, styling and conversation. Kabiru’s portraits use a different means of altering what a viewer expects to see. He places an object directly across his own face, then looks out through or around it. The comparison is useful because both make the future a matter of image-making in the present. Neither has to wait for a new machine to arrive before an old visual hierarchy can be questioned.
The portrait, the bicycle and the radio also resist a simple story in which new technology replaces old objects. Kabiru’s father’s vehicle has a later life in sculpture. His grandmother’s wireless becomes a structure for imagining memory and transmission. The handmade glasses refuse to behave like a streamlined product. Across these works, obsolescence is never the same as silence. An object can stop serving its original task and still speak about the relationships formed around it. The artist listens to those relationships before deciding how far to change the object’s form.
That is why the wearer in a C-Stunners portrait matters as much as the found metal, and why the household memory matters as much as the radio’s case. Kabiru builds a future from specific encounters between people and things. His method does not promise that every discarded object can be saved, or that a sculpture can solve the conditions that created a dump. It shows the power of looking at what has been made disposable without accepting disposability as the last word. The glasses invite another gaze; the bicycle carries another journey; the radio receives another imagined voice. Each begins with what a city has left behind and ends with a form that makes the viewer look again.