The art world is finally catching up with British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu. She has long incorporated shamanic ritual and meditation in her art, which has healing at its core and spans film, painting, textiles, performance and social practice, but her interest in esoteric ideas was never taken seriously. “I was doing all this spiritual stuff at art school and people used to bully me and make fun of me,” she says. “It was really hard. I had a secret double life because nobody got it.”
Now, however, with the Covid pandemic and the rise of social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, care and healing are the issues of the moment and Ndiritu is in demand. She has worked with museums on restitution of looted objects, decolonisation and reactivating the “sacredness” of art spaces, often using shamanic performances. “If I’m asking people to go on a shamanic journey, I’ve done loads of them,” she says, “so it’s not a superficial thing, it’s a real thing.”
