Nairobi, May 14 -- At the One Off Art Gallery, prison uniforms dominate the canvases in Chorus of Beings, the new exhibition by artists Newton Eshivachi and Paul Njihia. The striped outfits appear again and again, draped over protestors, mourners and ordinary citizens navigating scenes that feel unmistakably Kenyan. They are not merely costumes. They are metaphors.

For Eshivachi, the recurring uniforms symbolise the many invisible systems that shape modern life.

"They represent the fact that we are controlled not only by political systems, but also by social, technological and economic structures that shape our reality," he says.

Across the exhibition, acrylic-on-canvas works wrestle with corruption, state violence, collective memory a...