Here we focus on the studio as a point of engagement, the process of making being crucial and as intensely engaging. we give space for critical exploration through supporting research An audience is invited and we often carry books and exchange books with artists with an intimate but diverse group of professions Medicine, law, entrepreneurs, engineers etc. We also carry along writers who we are interested in about the artists we visit.
Activating archives as a resource in contemporary art production: historical and cultural sites, physical libraries, human libraries, as potential knowledge embodiment.
UNDER GROUND currently relies on mobility for fluidity and flexibility: On movement between places and people. We still recognise the importance of physical art spaces and it’s potential together with organizing and mobilizing and networking and therefore we will in the near future need a conducive space.
Studio Crit Format attempts to devise tools for a gallery practice that will encourage theoretical and intellectual work in the Uganda’s art scene. Started in October 2020, Studio Crit is reaching out to modern and contemporary artists across the country and will organize at least three conversations with artist in their studio. A strategy borrowed from “Global Crit Clinic” this format was born of research necessity and has proven highly informative and will be sustained as part of our programs which plans to contact artists country-wide as part of its curatorial practice.
The choice of studio visitors is meant to intensify exchange between art and other fields of research, mediate knowledge between experts and locally based curators and artists. Moreover, it is hoped that these conversation will allow potential new audiences to access and demystify art making in spaces other than “the gallery”
Studio Visits
Buluma O. Mordecai March 2021
Buluma Ochungo Mordecai (1934) brief biography.
By Nantume Violet
My path with artist Buluma crossed on exactly 14th March 2021, 9 months after a futile search that took us to central and eastern Uganda. An invitation to contribute to an exhibition catalogue had come from Fisk University Galleries, Nashville and one of the works to be exhibited were of Buluma Ochungo Mordecai. Why would an artist projected to be one of the greatest painters of East Africa by Cecil Todd in the 60’s disappear off a scene’s radar! Buluma lived a quiet life after his retirement but also relocated from the city back to his home town. There was unfortunately no knowledge or trace locally of the artist’s where about through academia or art scene except a mention of him in a visual assay that situated his painting The Rocket Kiln in paper on modernization and urbanization in paintings from the collection of the Makerere Art Gallery /HCR in Kampala. There was however faxes shared by Perrin Lathrop from the university’s archives. These were correspondences with Harmon Foundation USA from 1960’s, a period within which it collected and exhibited his works before it closed down in 1967.
Studio Crit Format – Kyakonye Allan
Egg Portrait Series
Portraits of Queens, Kings, political leaders of past and present, and cultural icons appear illustriously in medallion shaped paintings: Familiar faces, encoding well-known histories. On monumental canvases Kyakonye Allan playfully intertwines these portraits with ancestral symbolism and material experimentation that contain hidden inscriptions of his personal biography.
The works comprising the Egg Portrait Series chose the oval shape as their primary framework. The egg, intuitively associated with new beginnings and cycles of rebirth, delivers the backdrop for the personalities the artist depicts using egg tempera of his own making: an organic choice of paint that gives the portraits a somewhat porous, brittle texture. The medallion portraits form the centerpiece of large “canvases” from aluminium foil, a material the artist collected from an early age.
Studio Crit Format – Ocom Ekuwe Adonius
ROYAL PARADOXES?
For the past three years, Ocom has worked on a question, Who is your saint? This body of work consists of several large scale collages, where I appropriate old newspapers to make surfaces for drawing. Flat layers of paper are glued and stacked together to achieve thick and strong mache on which charcoal and wash drawing are made. By doing so, he comments on and critique social-political, political structures in Uganda and around the globe using a religious lingo to question processes in which honour and virtue is awarded, depending on the value systems of different communities, nations and a people. The title of the series poses a question as a starting point to invite the viewer into conversation with the artwork. As part and parcel of engagement, the works have evolved to reflect on the audience’s reflection and understanding “of goodness” of how then specific humans become idealised and glorified, and therefore awarded or canonised. Together with the viewer dymstifies the standardised processes which allows inclusivity of the non-popular view, the non-grand characters whose contribution through small deeds of service and kindness support intricate structures of industry, banking and transport. More so than ever, this work sought to acknowledge the things that have time immemorial created an environment in which grand ideas flourish. The themes that inspire this question resolve around world politics, migration and sexuality.
Studio Visit – Mwesiga Ian
17th Dec 2020 and 1st Mar 2021.
Portraying African bodies using iconic photography
There are important works from Uganda contributing to the conversation of redefining portraiture. For instance, Mwesiga Ian’s current body of works springs from an encounter with pictures from an ethnographic archive at the Uganda’s Ethnographic Museum. In his quest to work with 1960 archival images, he has rummaged through colonial archives with images of post-independent Uganda. The works are typical of photographs taken of people from central Africa that were never intended for the gaze of those who appeared in them. This is not a phenomenon that occurred only after colonization; historically images taken of natives by explorers and missionaries were fundamental evidences used to argue for the need to occupy, conquer and impose a western civilization. In a powerful gesture, Mwesiga’s paintings take back control of the gaze to determine in what light he wants black people to be seen. The works also critique popularization imaging through which the colonial powers envisaged racial differences through a comparative method; by placing colonial subjects next to colonial masters in which cultural difference was also reduced to physical distinction in skin color.
