Isaac Kariuki is a Kenyan visual artist based in London and Nairobi currently completing a degree in Digital Arts. His work centres around themes of internet culture and nostalgia as it relates to marginalised personalities and identities.

His work centres on issues that are affecting the millennial generation, and marginalised and often overlooked voices and groups of people, especially on the internet and social media sphere.

His aim is to show those around him how digital art has the capacity to make the world a better place.

He is also interested in the nuances of masculinity, hypermasculinity, and the question of what makes a man. UP has previously featured Isaac’s video essay titled ‘Not a Woman, Not Yet a Man: Pop Music and Masculinity’, which explores gender performance, hypermasculinity and cultural anxiety in relation to pop music. This essay is a collection of 3 subjects: male performers in pop music and how they navigate the genre, how men (and people that subscribe to masculinity) react to and explore pop music when confronted with it, and race and masculinity in the genre, explored by writer, Giselle Defares.

Isaac is also the founder of Diaspora Drama, a space in which creative and interesting people of colour have a chance to express themselves artistically and about issues that affect them in general. This space created is to give people of colour ‘faith in the cyberspace’.

He describes diasporadrama.com as more of a zine (short for magazine) than a website or a blog.

SOCIAL

Twitter: @isaac_pdf
Facebook: isaacnewtonkariuki
Instagram: @isaackariuki.jpg/