Wuh.ey - “Kiti cha Kati”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Kiti cha Kati”

An elderly man sits at a bus stop. Behind him: a monumental poster with two faces, adorned with beads, masks, and colors—symbols of another world. In front of him, a rooster pecks at the asphalt. "Kiti cha Kati" —the space in between—is a meditation on time, identity, and the power of images in urban space.

Wuh.ey captures a moment in which history observes itself. The old man, in a light suit and hat, embodies modern Europe: rational, detached, controlled. Behind him, however, two faces shine brightly, disrupting this order—colorful, rhythmic, full of presence. There's no contradiction between the two worlds, but rather an invitation to dialogue.

The work plays with hierarchies. What was once framed as "exotic" in an ethnological museum now appears on a billboard in the middle of the city—larger, stronger, more confident. The roles have reversed: the European gaze no longer rests on the African object; it is viewed, penetrated, and reflected by it.

The rooster in the foreground is no coincidence. In many African cosmologies, it is considered a messenger between day and night, between life and the ancestral world. Here, it becomes a silent commentator: it guards the transition between the old order and the new perception.

"Kiti cha Kati" is Wuh.ey's reflection on visibility—on the return of the repressed into the visual world of the present. The street becomes a museum, the poster a devotional plaque, the person waiting a witness to a global memory.

This work doesn't ask who owns the future, but rather who is allowed to tell it. Between poster and passerby, tradition and modernity, human and symbol, a new equilibrium emerges: the silent awakening of the Other—in the heart of the city.