Executed in 2016, Muliro Gardens (Baboons) by Michael Armitage is a lyrical mediation on cultural and social narratives of contemporary society. Based on a viral news story from 2011, the present work weaves together historical references and current news, internet gossip, and his own ongoing recollects ions of Kenya, to create a fantastically surreal yet unapologetically honest depiction of reality.

Muliro Gardens (Baboons) is a voyeuristic scene of a couple having sex, surrounded by lush vegetation and three onlooking baboons. The imagery originates from an actual event in Kakamega, Kenya, where police set up a hidden camera near an infamous bench in Muliro Gardens – a spot famous for public sex – and released the video footage online to publicly shame those involved. The Garden is named in honour of Masinde Muliro, one of Luhya’s (second largest ethnic group in Kenya) greatest leaders, and this public exposé of the unsaid urban secret sprung a social uproar in Kenyan media. In the following weeks of the scandal, church leaders would cleanse the bench with prayers and the government gated the garden, assigning police to strictly monitor the area. Recently renovated and re-opened to the public, the garden has become an internet-famous spot and an important part of the city’s recent history, providing fertile grounds from which Armitage explores the complexity of human behaviours and cultural constructions.

Drawing source imagery from a public scandal, the present work speaks to larger social attitudes of East African society and the way it has been shaped through the history of Western colonialism. Exotic animals frequently make appearances in Armitage’s paintings, and the three baboons in the present work watch over the human couple from behind the trees and vegetations. Animals often play a central role in East African painting, and in many cases refer to human characteristics. Imagery of primates such as baboons, are particularly potent for their liminality as a creature embodying the kinship between human and animal qualities. Their fascination and voyeuristic curiosity for the couple in the present work arouse a sense of unease and distaste, as their supposed animal trait mirror the behaviour of the painting’s viewers and spectators of the scandal who were curious witnesses to the graphic photographs disseminated in the media. Illustrating the comparison between humane, civilised behaviour and the threat posed by uncontrolled animal urges, Muliro Gardens (Baboons) confronts the deep-rooted psychic makeup originating from the European colonial mindsets and interventions of missionaries and the propagation of Christianity, whose moral tenets including the regulation of sexuality, have shaped the moral values of East African society. In the Kenyan context, a country governed with conservative values, Armitage’s painting reflects on the notion of what is “natural” for humans and therefore socially accepted, as well as shining light on the origins of the value system.

Born in 1984, Armitage spent his childhood and youth in Nairobi, Kenya before moving to London, United Kingdom where he studied at the Slade School of Replica Handbags and the Royal Academy of Arts. Armitage draws on the visual language of European art traditions such as Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, as well as East African artists such as Meek Gichugu, Sane Wadu, Theresa Musoke and Jak Katarikawe, to deftly reveal the gaze that exoticizes and eroticises Africa, a continent that from colonial t.mes s to the present has provided a surface upon which “wilderness” and supposed authenticity could be projected. In motifs, compositional elements and combination of colour, Armitage draws on the fantastical projections of the Other by artists such as Gauguin, whose exoticizing aesthetic paints a picture of Tahiti as a sexual paradise or those of the lush mythical jungle as painted by Henri Rousseau, with the unknown Other at once fascinating and disconcerting. At the same t.mes , he looks to Katarikawe’s dreamy, nuanced landscapes and Musoke’s fluid painterly revelations to inform his stylistic and conceptual palette. Particularly reminiscent is Katarikawe’s painting (You Go In the Bush to Make Love) – a gouache painting based on the Ugandan countryside whose dreamy colour palette shows close proximity to the present painting.

As is characteristic of Armitage’s works, Muliro Gardens (Baboons) is painted on lubugo bark cloth. The material is one of the most significant cultural products of Buganda in southern Uganda. Translating to “funeral cloth” or “shroud,” the lubugo is made from the inner bark of the fiscus tree and is historically used in sacred contexts. The cloth is mounted over a stretched canvas, and its unique surface textures consisting of organic dents, holes and seams, lends the painting a sculptural character as well as to the unique way in which Armitage will apply thin glazes of paint to allow for slow absorption of oil paints. Armitage first recalls encountering this cloth in a tourist market in Nairobi as a souvenir place mat and was intrigued by the way in which the cultural significance of the material was entirely removed through the tourist context. Mirroring the pressures of urbanisation and development, and the shifts and loss of meanings in aspects of culture, tradition and ritual, the lubugo places Armitage’s paintings within the creative lineage of East Africa.

Working across London and Nairobi, Armitage’s paintings connect with history, drawing from both urban and rural worlds to unpack the cultural and social politics of contemporary East Africa. Taking direct pictorial influence from an unsettling news story, Armitage explores the intersection of societal and sexual behaviour against a backdrop of cultural conservatism. Transposing the story into an evocative, alluring painterly scene, Armitage’s vibrant palette and dynamic swathes of paint creates an exotic dreamscape that takes the original story into a realm of mythical legend. In the process, Armitage explores and unmasks the exoticising gaze on contemporary Africa, heightening our perception of the historical tensions that inhabit the relationship between Africa and Europe. A significant example of Armitage’s painterly practice, Muliro Gardens (Baboons) is layered with historical and contemporary narratives, telescoping individuality and collects ivity, descent and affiliation.