Recently I was listening to this ballad by Fela Anikulapo Kuti where he asserted that it is in the Western cultural tradition to carry sh*t. That Africans were taught by European man to carry sh*t. Dem go cause confusion and corruption’. How? Dem get one style dem use, dem go pick up one African man with low mentality and give him 1 million Naira bread to become one useless chief.
Artist Henry Mzili Mujunga speaks his mind about interference within the art scene in Africa.
Author: start
Today we’d like to introduce you to the new editor of Startjournal.
But first… a little backstory.
”START – A Journal of Arts and Culture” is a Kampala-based journal covering visual arts, performing arts, literature, music and other creative possibilities on the African continent . Start has been published four times as a printed magazine between 2007 and 2010, and has been online since December 2010.
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“Contemporary artists working on the African continent should concentrate on their soil. Dig it. Find its treasure and secrets and come up with something that will shake the world.”
Startjournal talks to Simon Njami, Independent Curator of contemporary art, Lecturer, Art Critic and Novelist about some contentious issues currently dominating discussion about contemporary African art.
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By Elizabeth Namakula KLA ART 014 was a far cry from the sophisticated and outdoor festival of 2012. The two festivals showed a progression from neat and tidy exhibits within shipping containers to multi layered commentary on informal living. This
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The selection of artists was diverse, alongside the more prominent names from the continent, such as Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo and Helen Zeru, there were also some less familiar local artists. Some of these practitioners were previously un-recognised as ‘artists’ and even some of the more familiar names had appeared dormant in Uganda for most of the last decade, well at least in the public’s eye.
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The bodaboda project manifests the “unmapped” theme by bridging the gap between its audience and the artwork. It achieves this by taking public art to the public. Participating artist, Papa Shabani shared his excitement about the opportunity to interact with people and to have his art be part of a unique experience that has been relished by the public.
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When programming, we extensively discuss how you, our audience would experience the festival, the final product. “However programming our annual festival is a creative process, of equal importance as the final product in itself. It is a process of experimenting and exploring, in close consultation and cooperation with both artists and partners we select.”
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Bayimba International Festival of the Arts, now in its seventh edition, continues to provide more for its expanding audience. This year’s program has two performance stages, yoga classes, experimental music as well as a discussion about artist rights. The visitors
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For a country like Uganda looking for ways of creating a sustainable tourism product, developing a synergy between culture, arts and other sectors of the economy is crucial.
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The works submitted for the inaugural Kampala Biennale left me thinking, confirming, some assumptions I have, and made me continue contemplating the realities, expectations and dreams of what it is to be an artist in our time. How do we link to times before ours and those which are yet to come?
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The reduced numbers at the 2014 Eastern Regional drew a lot of comparison with previous festivals. This contrast could be made between last year’s performers and those of 2014, yet their disparity is not based on regional descent; rather, on popularity.
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The biennale’s theme “Progressive Africa” is at once a mirror and a clarion call. It enables the organisers and participants to take a critical look at the past and face up to the future with renewed hope and enthusiasm. In other words, it straddles the past, present, and future in its philosophic and metaphoric essences.
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Biennale, Biennale, Biennale. Like a war-cry, the artist of Africa have something to say. This time they will be shouting out from the streets and galleries of Kampala. In a push to showcase Kampala on the global arts agenda, a
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On the weekend of June 14-15, two contrasting cultures came together under the umbrella of art to celebrate the life and times of Scottish explorer and missionary Alexander MacKay, who devoted his life to journeying through Uganda. Ugandan artists Sanaa Gateja, Xenson, and art curator Violet Nantume joined forces with Deveron Arts in Rhynie, Scotland, for a two-day event filled with creative activities centred on cultural integration.
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Nestled behind tea-matted hills with a reputation for cleanliness, Fort Portal is culturally self-contained, even resistant. For the success of the festival, Bayimba partnered intricately with the community to develop workshops, a brass band procession, a boda boda art exhibition.
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As persistent pleas are made to artists to create art with local significance the artists are caught up in a web of conflicted interest. On the one hand, they want to break away from the mould of Western art history bestowed onto them by university art education.
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The duo had a call from 32? East to “work in dialogue”. This involved the artists pushing boundaries of their art in the community and experimenting with a diversity of media and techniques.
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This collaboration between The Garbage Collectors project 2014 and Ugandan environmental artists is representative of socially conscious art. As such, it gives artists an opportunity to work with a variety of media and technique, at the same time extending their work to the public.
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The tension between public and private forms of art marks part of the identity crisis that defines making, exhibiting, performing and selling. Do we need to tick the public box to be relevant? How does the diaspora receive the references
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This petite and easy read is a testament to the importance of telling our own stories. We usually talk about this in reference to being African; outsiders have been telling our stories since before the days of Heart of Darkness, a book published more than a hundred years ago that continues to define the continent in the minds of many. Today we have movie stars like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck, testifying in front of American Congress or on CNN as “African experts”. It is no wonder that we continue to feel misrepresented or invisible, that millions of dollars are spent annually on aid programs that are later found to not work.
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