santoni kina

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Exhibitions Images and Recordings: View.

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Recent Exhibition:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Los Angeles (4478).

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation : View.

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Bio

santoni kina is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Kenya, living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Their work records the body as a site for investigation, where themes around identity and intimacy can be explored. Producing through a range of mediums and methods, santoni works to understand their community, positionality and consequent experience.

They are currently pursuing their BFA at Otis College of Art and Design and attended Yale Norfolk School of Art 2024.

{c.01/25/2025. Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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[A Note on U looking? (2024). Included in (paradise) .]

U looking?

Somehow this question covers the entire duration of this work: looking; wanting to see more, to read what’s covered-up—and then realizing that my position is interrupting the breeze gently blowing the transparent sheets: I’m in the way. There was already something set in motion that had nothing to do with me—now I really notice that I’m looking.

There are multiple but seemingly repeating pages (too quick to tell). I want to see more, and with the multiple pages it seems like there definitely is more, but by the end I’m back to the surface. The pages keep turning and the work keeps turning its back to me. I turn around to look at fan behind me. And then I turn back to look again. I’m looking.

The front is also a back. The figure in the first photo you’ll see has their back turned. And the candidness of the picture, as if I’m looking through someone’s bathroom window, puts me precisely in the place of a voyeur as soon as I’m close enough to see the image. There is no distance between the looker ‘in’ the photograph, and the looker in the gallery ‘along’ the image—all the looking occurs in the same instant, while keeping me out of the ‘whole picture.’ I’m always outside the work, at its limit—even though I’m implicated in all of its activities. Fleeting glimpses of the text reveal bits from an intimate but ambiguously im/personal exchange, like looking at (someone else’s) DMs or their chats on a dating app. Nearby, far away.

A lot of people asked to leaf-through this piece. (“No.”) More than one looker has mentioned Matisse’s nude figures with their backs turned, tergiversating. (One of the more memorable of these works, “Seated Nude, Back Turned,” arrives with his turn toward more realistic scenes: perhaps there’s something of the real in a turned back.) For me, this kind of unidentified p[r]ose always seems to turn a figure inside out; somehow, dorsals are the most vulnerable place of a body because I can’t keep watch without reflection, a photo—without a double-image or someone else looking. 

It’s where a body falls out of sync and becomes more. Someone else, somewhere else.

—80

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: