Renée Mboya

Renée Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker based in Nairobi. Her work is concerned with memory and specifically the use of autobiography in contemporary narratives to rehabilitate misrepresentations in history.

Renée’s most recent project opened at de Appel Arts Centre, in Amsterdam, and was entitled You Must Make Your Death Public. It was a concept loosely inspired by the working methodology of filmmaker Chris Kraus that involved taking oneself as a case study - as one’s own case in point, being first and foremost one’s own most immediately available raw material and doing so without shame. (In this sense, the case study was what it meant to study at de Appel in the midst of the dramatic administrative and managerial crisis that occurred there in 2014/2015). Their public offering was a way, a dangerous way, of speaking the unspeakable in the now - a contemporaneity for which there was no suitable form. A form that allowed all speakers to have their own agency to speak completely. Instead of this meaning it could be spoken, it means quite the opposite: that it must be. And it was only through an unashamed subjectivity that it could be.

Renée’s practice has since evolved into one that relies on storytelling as a form of research and production.