The Nest Collective & Jake Michael Singer

The Nest Collective and Jake Michael Singer are distinct in their approach, but share the pursuit of exploring how the world around us shapes the human experience.

The Nest Collective and Jake Michael Singer are distinct in their approach, but share the pursuit of exploring how the world around us shapes the human experience.  The collective, a group of 10 Nairobi-based artists and activists, delves into mythological expression while Singer, a multidisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, questions our sense of reality in hyper-digital environments.

Founded in 2012, the Nest Collective has created works in full, music, fashion, visual arts and literature.  They create work that dissects Kenyan culture and its relationships with modernity, its past and the edges between its social layers and citizens.  In the photographic series, "Wall of Men" and "Paynette and Candles", the collective is dissecting and subverting the layers of how Africans are seen and unseen, what Africans can and cannot do, and what Africans can and cannot say.

Jake Michael Singer (b. 1991) is a visual artist and sculptor who draws inspiration from architecture, urban landscapes and exploring how people interact with built space.  This is evident in his photographic works from both series, "Catastrophes" and "Promises of the City".  His more recent series, "Promises of the City" is a five-part photo-epic performed in a cyclone of plastics and found objects on the rooftop of a building in Johannesburg.  Singer attempts to bridge the chasm between the performed and the photographed, as well as the physical and the digital.