Fauziah Anyango held a photography slideshow titled Space to Unfold on April 11 at the Contemporary Image Centre (CIC) in Westlands, Nairobi.
The slideshow was structured in chapters, each drawn from one body of work. The images explored violence, identity, and heritage, together with works that were aesthetically pleasing while engaging themes of Afrofuturism, love, and faith.
Each image was placed in response to the one before it and created a flow that guided the viewer through emotions and ideas. While a photograph captures a moment, a sequence reveals meanings that might go unnoticed separately.
Most of the images already exist online, but are easy to scroll past and forget. Presenting them as a slideshow was a way to hold attention differently. In this setting, the audience experienced the work together.
The style highlighted how much context influences the way images are understood. Instead of passively consuming through scrolling, they were engaged through dialogue and reflection.
A photograph titled Orange is a project centred on self-love as an active becoming. A figure meets herself in a moment of stillness while holding a bloom that mirrors her own body.
The colours merge and take away the distance between who she is and what she is becoming, she describes.
Anyango guided people through the artworks by speaking about her process, with a focus on light, movement, and interaction. The images stayed on screen longer as she questioned what they originally meant and what they might mean now.
“It allows me to revisit the work with the audience, to reframe and examine what it was and what it reveals now,” she says.
The CIC setting creates an intimate environment where the work can be experienced and discussed more openly.
Space to Unfold shows her intense attention to detail in building sets, but once she presents the work, she releases control. What she sets out to depict at the beginning of a project changes, or even breaks, by the time she is editing.
“In that process, images start to resist me. They reveal things I didn’t plan or see. It becomes about discovering what was there all along,” she says.
Her photography journey began in childhood, when her uncle first gave her a camera during family vacations.
Later, after being turned down by a fashion influencer she wanted to photograph, she ventured into creating her own work more seriously.
She has explored architecture and street photography and later learned to build worlds through the medium at Dandia Sanaa, a creative community.
Now she is focused on the unpredictability of the street and candid photography in Nairobi.
“Stories are always happening. It is about noticing when something changes, like a gesture or a glance, and responding to it,” she expresses.