This catalogue is published alongside the exhibition:
In This Valley of Dying Stars
by Jess Atieno at The African Arts Trust in Nairobi, Kenya
from 12 June to 16 August 2026
Jess Atieno investigates African brutalist architecture to reveal how we are haunted not only by the past, but also by futures never realized. Once envisioned as monuments to liberation, progress, and collective futurity, these structures now persist as spectral forms suspended between utopian aspiration and historical rupture.
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. We are invited to step into a valley of the undead in which the past remains unresolved and the future in constant flux.