Ugandan Recordings is a Scandal Studios project to uncover and document music from northern Uganda. The search has found artists with a variety of instruments such as adungu, lukeme, nang’a, bila and orak. All recorded songs are accompanied by video clips, so one can see how each artist creates their work.
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“Artists are just another manifestation of human rights activists.” – says artist and activist Deeyah Khan to the United Nations.
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“Performance art is for very strong people, in my view; you put yourself in a dangerous situation and are able to come out of it.” says Ato’o.
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Photographer Oscar Kibuuka captures the 2013 Bayimba Festival in black and white.
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Opinion piece by Faisal Kiwewa The current state of Uganda’s creative cultural sector is far more vibrant and visible than what generations in the past have ever seen. It is today that we see the youth coming together to realize
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Issue 39 of Start Journal intends to use the online platform as a space to inspire.
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In the art room of Greenhill Academy Secondary school in Kampala, students have been transformed from carrying just a pencil and sketchpad to textbooks and notebooks. For most of these students art was never theoretical, now they are pushed to research and write essays on the subjects of Renaissance art and Greek and Roman architecture.
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By Eria Nsubuga Twelve students from Nkumba University’s School of Commercial Industrial Art and Design (SCIAD) collaborated to produce a piece inspired by European masters. How did they choose the Picasso and van Gogh? As their supervisor, I tasked
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I continue to reflect on Lubumbashi and feel affirmed that discussions, spaces and documentation is the way to make the little we have into something bigger and better.
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From the start, Uganda’s contemporary visual arts were defined by the absence of their own ‘authentic’ tradition. Throughout the early twentieth century, Makerere University’s European directors sought either to stimulate a latent African-ness of their own imagining in the students, or to push them into the future via an exposure to foreign experiments in representation
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Start Journal used this informal education space to invite writers to engage with on-the-spot writing opportunities. We set a brief and surprisingly, all seven writers picked different displays and different approaches to documenting the work.
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Arts education comes in many forms and serves a multitude of functions. Start Journal wonders what it means to have arts education institutionalized and how states govern this process.
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Nairobi Half Life’s (2012) premise encapsulates the city’s nickname ‘Nairoberry’. By attempting to portray Nairobi as a city full of cliché characters: thieves, corrupt policemen, prostitutes and homosexuals, the film fails to inform us of the realities of Nairobi’s inhabitants.
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Over the last two decades specific diaspora curators (and theorists) of contemporary African art have become preoccupied with nationalism. Academic minds have tried to explain the internal-external dislocation experienced by the artist. However, the theoretical and thick the arguments do not address this fundamental ‘street’ or self problem.
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Mango Roses is a recounting of Uganda’s troubled past weaved through the chaotic journey of two lead female character.
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The small community that patronises our art, usually constituting diplomats, expatriates and tourists, is not sustainable. They have set for us a standard formula to use in order to satisfy their appetites.
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The art world is full of problems and solutions. Sometimes the problems seem so insurmountable that one wonders how an inspired mind could surpass them. Other times the possibilities are so apparent that only fools would ignore them. Through selective
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It is not enough to recognise an arrival of craft — there must be a push to improve or a platform for debate. The result: practiced notions of process and evolution emerged within a thoughtfully curated exhibition space.
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Competitions can be classrooms. The Spoken Word Project in Uganda could be exactly that — a space to teach and learn.
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The Venice Biennale undoubtedly remains one of the most important platforms for international contemporary art and its market. A national participation allows for visibility, for a national statement and leaves a footprint in certain version of the international history of art.
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