Michael Armitage (b. 1984, Nairobi)

The Chicken Thief

2019, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 200 x 150cm.

Photo by White Cube. Courtesy of White Cube and Michael Armitage. ©Michael Armitage.

It’s 2017, and the Kenyan national elections were drawing near. Artist Michael Armitage attended a political rally of one of the opposition parties. In a rousing speech, the leader of the party declared that he will take his followers to “Canaan”, the “promised land” of the Israelites in the Biblical story. Armitage painted a series of works about the 2017 Kenyan elections, based on his own observations and from images he saw on social media. In this painting, we see a man running with two plump chickens that he stole. Often during protests, shops become targets for looters. In the chaos of the election season, this man managed to escape in one piece - mostly. Behind him trails a shadowy, baboon-like figure, engulfed in flames. Armitage often makes use of anthropomorphic symbolism in his paintings. He likened it to the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire where animals represented different figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917. What could the baboon, engulfed in flames represent, with regards to the Kenyan elections 100 years later?