In This Valley
Of Dying Stars

New Work by Jess Atieno
African Arts Trust
12.6.-16.8.2026

In This Valley of Dying Stars reveals how we are haunted not only by the lingering weight of the past, but also by futures that were once imagined and never realized. At the heart of the exhibition lies Jess Atieno´s investigation of brutalist architecture in the context of post-independence Africa. Once envisioned as monuments to liberation, progress, and collective futurity, these structures now persist as weathered remnants — spectral forms suspended between utopian aspiration and historical rupture.

These architectural studies become an entry point into a psychic and temporal landscape where time folds in on itself: a valley of the undead in which the past remains unresolved and the future in constant flux. Through printmaking, sculpture and sound, Atieno traces how power is inscribed onto bodies, landscapes, and systems of representation, revealing the ways architecture functions not only as structure, but as ideology and memory. Yet the exhibition also gestures toward alternative geographies and modes of seeing, opening space for speculative futures to emerge from the ruins of broken promises.