Jackie Karuti is an artist based between Nairobi and Amsterdam. Her practice is founded on ideas around perception, image construction, knowledge production and the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination. Departing from drawing, video and film, she considers the moving and projected image as a way to generate thought. 

Karuti is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, 2023-2025) and Àsìko (Lagos, 2014); the roaming Pan African art school established by the late Bisi Silva, to redress the frequently outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa.

She was the recipient of the Follow Fluxus-After Fluxus scholarship in 2021 and the Henrike Grohs Award in 2020 which saw the release of her debut monograph, Notes Movement Method (Mousse, 2020).

Her seminal work, In the Case of Books (2013-2015) invited fellow artists and friends to visit and dust libraries in Nairobi and Kampala as a way of examining the anatomy of knowledge, place of books, the identity and relevance of libraries and the myths and rituals amongst the participating persons and institutions.

Select residences include Ichinomiya City (Japan, 2022), Nassauischer Kunstverein (Wiesbaden, 2021), WIELS Contemporary Art Center (Brussels, 2019), Gasworks (London, 2016) and 32º East (Kampala, 2015).

Solo exhibitions include, Body Machine Location (Kunsthalle Bern, 2023), Division: Before Line/ After Image (Goethe Institut Nairobi, 2023) and Shapeshifting and the Impossibility of Weathered Wood (NKV Wiesbaden, 2021).

Karuti’s work has been exhibited in major art exhibitions including the Aichi Triennale (Japan, 2022), Lofoten International Art Festival (Norway, 2019) and the Dak’Art Biennale (Senegal, 2018). Select group exhibitions and talks include Het WereldMuseum (Leiden, 2024), Performing Arts Forum (France, 2021), Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (Norway, 2021) and SAVVY Contemporary (Germany, 2018).

Programming films for educational purposes also responds to her practice. Projects include: Six Minutes at the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam, 2025), Rehearse, Replay, Repeat at Het Documentaire Paviljoen (Amsterdam, 2024), The Journey of the Hyena at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam, 2024), Artists’ cinema, video and experimental film program at Unseen cinema (Nairobi, 2022-2023) and The Out Film Festival at the Goethe Institut (Nairobi, 2016-2018).

Some recent writing projects include a text contribution in Matter Mattering Matters: A Scienticity Reader and Words, a publication presenting the writing and text-based explorations of twenty-five Rijksakademie artists.