From February 9th to the 13th 2015, 21 fine art students, curators-to-be, and recent graduates participated in the AtWork workshop, equipped with two small moleskine notebooks. One book was reserved for ideas, question, and notes and the second for executing their interpretation to the question, “should I take off my shoes?” They worked under the direction of Simon Njami, with the support of Dr. Lillian Nabulime and Dr. George Kyeyune from the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts.
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Category: Investigative Analysis
The debate whether African art belongs in Global Exhibitions is one that dominates many art forums across the continent and beyond today. Artists, in a bid to assert their position in this era of globalization and emerge as international citizens have continuously produced artworks that tackle global themes like Environmental conservation, Recycling, Consumption , Material culture, Corruption, Gender & Sexuality and Feminism.
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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.
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 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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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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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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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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Bayimba Gulu was dynamic and full of culture. Raymond Omerio Ojakol was there to cover it.
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The philosophy of Double Lives is clear: when two planes of the mind are combined a third plane emerges — reconditioning identity.
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The photographic project Britain Loves Africa by Campbell attempts to give viewers a domestic insight into the homes of couples living in East Africa of whom one partner is British and the other African. With these images she raises a subject that would normally be informally explored, in conversation or gossip, and given it a platform for public debate.
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We know that our thoughts are shaped by the world around us. We also know that the world is cruel towards women. Thus, in ‘not thinking’ there is inevitably some kind of thought process. It is even more critical with regards to political artist like Soi.
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The future appropriation of this archive proves that the archive is never closed. It is, in fact, open and reworked by contemporary visual artists.
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Review By Moses Serubiri on Nudity at Tackling Texts On 19 February 2014, a meeting of artists, art lecturers, students and arts managers convened at the Makerere Art Gallery for the year’s first Tackling Texts, a forum to engage African
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