Twenty-four year old visual artist Nelson Niyakire hails from Burundi, but it is circumstances in far off Kenya that inspired him to hold his first exhibition in Rwanda.

His Tribu Imaginaire solo exhibition opened officially on Friday, August 7, at the Innovation Village atop the Kigali Library Services roof top. It runs until August 28.

On Thursday, a day before the official launch, the painter threw a more private launch party for a select crowd of art enthusiasts and friends.

Tribu Imaginaire (Imaginary Tribe) is an exhibition inspired by dreams, culture and beauty in a remote Kenyan village, as seen through Niyakire’s paint brush.

It is a tribute to Umoja Village, an all-female matriarch settlement in Samburu County, 380 km outside the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

It is a sanctuary for homeless women and girls fleeing violence and forced marriages.

Symbolically, the village is a stand against the traditional subordinate position of women in the Kenyan society and, as such, focuses primarily on women empowerment.

This makeshift “tribe” of resilient women is what inspired Niyakire’s exhibition, the first he is holding outside his native Burundi. Tribu Imaginaire is his attempt at paying tribute to the women of Umoja Village by recreating an imaginary village of women from all corners of Africa, seeking a safe haven grounded on unity, defiance, and re-inventing of oneself.

To augment his point further, all the paintings on show at the exhibition are portraits of African feminine beauty at its best. The painter took every care to portray African beauty in all its regional diversity.

Niyakire discovered the story of the Umoja Village via a documentary he watched on TV at the end of last year.

“I was really touched by the story of those women. After watching the documentary I went on and did a lot of research on those women, and I realised they faced a lot of trials and difficulties in their lives, hence deciding to live together,” he explained during the Thursday pre-launch event:

“That courage to go beyond all those challenges, set a village and organised themselves in it – that courage and will to overcome all the difficulty they faced in life really inspired me,” said Niyakire.