Maggie Otieno, The Memory of Matter

One-hundred-and-fifty-year-old railway sleepers, time-worn wood, metal and reclaimed materials become sculptures in the hands of Maggie Otieno. Efie Gallery in Dubai presents Sojourner: The Difference is the Same, the Kenyan artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which has represented her since 2024. The exhibition brings together a new body of work and continues a practice developed over almost three decades around the memory embedded in objects and their transformation. Born in 1974 and based in Nairobi, Otieno has developed her artistic language through wood, metal and discarded industrial materials. Her semi-abstract forms retain visible irregularities, fractures and traces of use, incorporating them into the composition. She is also known in Kenya for her large-scale public installations in Nairobi, while her work has been exhibited in several African countries, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. At the heart of the Dubai exhibition are the reclaimed railway sleepers with which the artist has worked for some time. Dating back approximately 150 years, the timbers were brought from India to East Africa in the late 19th century for the construction of railway lines. Materials originally intended to support the movement of people and goods are assembled and reconfigured by Otieno into static structures, in which the colonial history of infrastructure remains inscribed in the surfaces and physical weight of the wood itself. The exhibition also includes works created during a residency in the summer of 2025 at El Anatsui’s studio in Tema, Ghana. There, Otieno worked with fragments of old wooden canoes, once again turning to materials associated with travel and passage. Some sculptures are articulated with hinges and take on a book-like form, transforming the opening and closing of the object into a metaphor for the unfolding of stories. The title Sojourner refers to someone who stays temporarily in a place, moving through territories without permanently belonging to them. The idea finds a counterpart in the materials Otieno chooses: wood that has travelled, supported railways or formed boats, preserving traces of its previous functions. Rather than erasing those marks, the artist incorporates them into new forms, making sculpture a meeting point between memory, transformation and passage.