Collaborative Exhibitions

SILENT INVASIONS: THE ART OF MATERIAL HACKING

An exhibition presented by UNDER GROUND Contemporary Art Kampala,

Vodo Art Society & Lab, Weaver Bird Residency and Amasaka Gallery

Together with blaxTARLINES Kumasi

Location: Plot 12, Birch Avenue, Masaka City

We are creating our own accesses and silent invasions. Such silent revolutions spread like a mycorrhizal underground network that is sprouting between Ghanaian blaxTARLINES and the art communities of Uganda. This Uganda-Ghana- Swiss Exchange program, organized by UNDER GROUND Contemporary Art (Uganda), Vodo Art Society and Lab (Uganda), Weaver Bird Residency and Amasaka Gallery (Uganda), hosts the blaxTARLINES art community (Ghana) to stage an exhibition that delves into the expansive concept of hacking, exploring its applications to materials, ideologies, and intangible viral forms.

The exhibition silently invades an architecture abandoned to its unrealized future: Like foliage slowly expanding in construction left to its fate, art is sprouting on unfinished brick walls like unusual mushrooms, mingling with the structure to finally overtake it. Whether it is abandoned architectures, habits of viewing art, norms of communication, the social resignifications of collective memories, the politics of safety and surveillance, the politics of representation, historical narratives– hacking as a form of insertion of new subjectivities into existing (and often narrowly defined) systems can take many forms and have many subjects. It is not more and not less than hijacking the vantage point to steer the narration towards new perspectives.

Engaging with such complex discourses demands exploring a plethora of diverse forms beyond the traditional painting and sculpture inherited from colonization which largely informs the background of most artists from the continent. Contemporary artists pursue no limit in forms and content as they embrace video, photography, performance, digital art, installations using local materials, and numerous alternative media we cannot even taxonomize easily.

While this exchange focuses on Uganda and Ghana, it serves as a vital step towards connecting the broader African art scene. Now more than ever, it has become politically pivotal for artists from the African continent to engage with each other, especially, when the premise of Contemporary Art is to transcend national boundaries and more importantly “de-center” art beyond Europe and America. It emphasizes the importance of a united African art community, testing an economy of community currencies and embracing the diversity and richness of the continent as a whole. As East and West Africa connect, a stronger, more cohesive African art community emerges, one that celebrates diversity, embraces resilience, and propels the continent forward.

A special issue of OnCurating Zurich dedicated to the experience and its theoretical, practical, and poetic consequences will be published in Spring 2024. It will re-house the project into the form of writing, building on the four-year collaborative research process in world-making and insurgent production practices in the Global South.

Exhibiting artists:

Ethel Aanyu (Uganda), Bright Ackwerh (Ghana), Adjo Kisser (Ghana), Afia Prempeh (Ghana), Akosua Opeibea Yeboah (Ghana), Akanyijuka Evans (Uganda), Aloka Trevor (Uganda), Hassan Issah (Uganda), Kasagga Dennis (Uganda), Godelive Kasangati Kabena (DRC), Jacqueline Katesi Kalange (Uganda), Matt Kayem (Uganda), Kiggundu Rodney (Uganda), Henry Kiyingi (Uganda), Kyakonye Allan (Uganda), Chadrack Makano (DRC), Nanteza Florence (Uganda), Dan Ngaara Ngalamulume (Rwanda), Odur Ronald (Uganda), Ojok Simon Peter (Uganda), Frederick Ebenezer Okai (Ghana), Jonathan Okoronkwo (Ghana), Piloya Irene (Uganda), Sandra Suubi (Uganda), Lisa C Soto (Puerto Rico/Ghana), Xenson Ssenkaaba (Uganda), Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson (Ghana), Wamala Kyeyune (Uganda), Yiga Joshua (Uganda)

Program:
Fri, Nov 10, 7 pm: Opening performance by Xenson Ssenkaaba

Sat, Nov 11, from 12 am: Artist and curator walkthroughs

Sat, Nov 11, 2 pm: Procession with Sandra Suubi

Sun, Nov 12, from 12 am: Performance by Godelive Kasangati Kabena

Mural painting across Masaka City

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That Those Beings Be Not Being

Group Exhibition with Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Sheila Nakitende

and Theresah Ankomah

Opening 6th – 29th May 2022 / Wed-Sat 4 – 7 pm

alpha nova & galerie futura, Berlin

Curators: Julia Gyemant and Nantume Violet

“Relation is knowledge in motion” – writes Edouard Glissant in his book Poetics of Relation from which we borrowed our title. As a form of errant knowledge, relation is capable to birth new and unexpected forms, abandoning the solid grounds of defined categories – such as the Nation, the Self and the Other – and venturing into the opaque gaps within.

The works of Dorothy Amenuke, Nakitende Sheila, and Theresah Ankomah presented in this exhibition explore questions of transience and relationality in diverse and complicated ways, establishing themselves within this space of opacity, in which according to Glissant lies the radical potential to subvert systems of domination. That which cannot be understood, cannot be controlled. That which cannot be fixed to a singular meaning in consonance with a certain cognitive framework, is free to roam and perpetuate its difference, producing a multiplicity of meanings in the process.

In this fashion, the artworks on show lay out their narratives each using their very own idiosyncratic vocabulary: Scrolls in invented alphabets, natural fibers cast into abstract forms, objects of everyday usage appropriated to populate the exhibition space. In processes of weaving, stitching, sewing the works become sites of relationships with shifting ranges of roles. The artist, the material, the artwork, the spectator, the space all enter an interplay setting of complex and mobile relations. They deliver the grounds for an ongoing, open-ended conversation.

Dorothy Amenuke uses worn garments sourced from family and friends to compose monumental scrolls inscribed with abstract characters and images. Through them she investigates relationships within a multidimensional space of social, cultural as well as territorial conjunctions.

Nakitende Sheila centers her work on formation through pattern and behavior, researching into barkcloth fiber derived from the tree Ficus natalensis, commonly known as "Mutuba" among the Baganda people. Nakitende transforms its structure and nature into abstract organic forms through twisting, stitching and burning.

Theresah Ankomah’s installation works with woven kenaf baskets (commonly used to store and sell produce on markets) to investigate the complexities of ‘craft’ in relation to trade and how underpinning issues of geopolitics, gender and capitalism resonate in the everyday usage of these materials and objects.

The three artists’ sculptural experiments are intertwined in the exhibition to a space of perpetual mutability marked by shifting perspectives instead of stipulated discourses. A space where paradoxes are left to their productive ambiguity. That Those Beings Be Not Being: beyond grammar, beyond fixed taxonomies and identities the exhibition seeks to explore the in-betweens to encounter the genesis of new meanings and adjacencies.

Artists

Dorothy Akpene Amenuke

‘Space,’ in its broader manifestations, is usually much larger than the immediacy of the ‘place’ that is occupied. Whereas place (the “named-space”) has bounds and limitations imposed on it by human activity so that it assumes nominal specificity, space on the other hand, is boundless and vast, reaching out far beyond human limit. Spatiality in the public sphere and personal domain, thus, generally leads to severe or even subtle political contestation. In its shared and private manifestations, spatiality constitutes an entity, impregnated with the dualistic characteristics of homogeneity and heterogeneity and governed by various tropes of inclusion/exclusion or center/periphery politics. These characteristics in turn birth notions of migration, exile, border transgression and/or even the more vulgar notions of voyeurism, espionage and now in fashion, terrorism. Space is thus multidimensional, with social, cultural, territorial as well as psychic dimensions. In interrogating space as active rather than passive, spatial metaphors are employed to redefine the perception of modern space, questioning territorial power plays within and without cultural settings and relationships. Clothes are repositories of oceans of identity and curiously carries enough messages from the body. Clothes thus, not only cover the individual’s body by leaving it at the point of the re-territorialized, but becomes a vehicle for conveying the content of spatiality - psychic subjectivities. Used clothes (donated by family and friends and also bought) are deconstructed and reconstituted into a space of interaction- a space of negotiation, which in Rogoffian inhabitation might be referred to as ‘antechamber’. With the deconstructed clothes, a ‘scroll’ is created, for a flora and fauna picture-reading to investigate relationships.

Dorothy Akpene Amenuke - PhD (b 1968, Ghana) is an artist who lives and works in Kumasi Ghana. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Her research interests focus on themes that reference to a large extent different ways of ‘space’ consumption with mixed media and installations. Amenuke is the coordinator of the itinerant OFKOB Artists’ Residency in Ghana and has also participated in several international art workshops and residencies, directing some of them. She was a recipient of the 2012 Howard Kestenbaum/Vijay Paramsothy International Fellowship in the Haystack Mountain School of crafts, USA and has several shows (both solo and group) to her credit. Her work, “How Far How Near”, is in the collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (SMA). Amenuke’s art involves the manipulation of a variety of fabrics and fibres into objects and spatial installations that evoke feelings of containment and protections or even subtle repulsion. Devotion becomes a recurring metaphor in her use of materials, laborious processes and communal strategies in the production of her work.

Sheila Nakitende

Even with the awareness of being mortal, humans have proven to be the highest uncontrollable life force. In our journey to advance, humans, unknowingly, become a distinctive virus. Just like a biological virus needs a host body to purpose further and live, so do humans. They move and occupy spaces where they are able to initiate or encounter new dynamics. Exchange of resources, knowledge, intermarriages, disagreements, wars and migrations are just some examples of man’s survival behavior. They can either adapt (become part of), create (make) or destroy (break). In these processes, humans mutate through multiplication and transformation and sometimes division.

“ABAANA BA KINTU” explores these mutations via material transformations of barkcloth and other natural fibres, casting their basic structure into abstract organic forms using paper hand- crafting. Translated from the Luganda proverb “Abaana Ba Kintu tebaliggwaawo” to mean “The descendants of Kintu (legendary ancestor of the Baganda) shall never cease”, mankind is constantly renewed. In her installation Nakitende revisits her late maternal grandfather’s home as a shared space in which relationships, interactions, emotional expressions of hugs and kisses spontaneously and constantly embody and expand patterns of being. A home / house is that space of livelihood, gathering, ideas, occurrences, and transformations.

Nakitende employs natural fibers of raffia, banana leaves and, mostly, barkcloth harvested from the natal fig tree (Ficus Natalensis), turning them into delicate paper-pieces onto which she applies techniques such as weaving, stitching, burning and repair. The exploration of the fibres’ physical patterns, formation and behavior, leads her to formulate larger questions about the complexities of human connections, transmissions and memories.

Sheila Nakitende (b 1983, Uganda) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice focuses on nurturing, evolving aesthetics, material culture and methodological history while addressing current influences and transformations. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Fine Art and Design from Makerere University in 2005. She worked with painting before exploring installation and performance art. Her artistic experience ranges from concept development, product and graphics design to gallery curatorial practice, coordinating arts projects, participating in local and international art workshops, residencies and exhibitions. She participated in the Kampala Art Biennale and Kampala Art Auction 2016. She is a recipient of the Parent residency grant 2017 New York and has exhibited internationally in Kenya, Congo, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Belgium, Austria and USA.

Theresah Ankomah

Theresah Ankomah is an artist living and working in Accra, Ghana. Her artistic expressions manifest in the form of performative installations, sculpture, painting, weaving, fashion, and printmaking.

In recent times, she has been interested in exploring Kenaf woven baskets, strings, jute rope and palm leaves at all levels and scales of weaving while at the same time examining the hidden stories associated with the making of these objects. Her interest also lies in how their usage is susceptible to temporality as well as permanence.

Theresah engages in the materiality of these objects, researching the incredible ways in which they interweave in the nuanced lives of the people who make and use them.

The objects she uses in her installations are marked by time and they build a database of DNA and fingerprints of their makers and the audience who engages with it, which becomes a tapestry of different experiences. She believes these objects are a living archive of experiences captured in a time capsule yet to be noticed.

Theresah Ankomah (b 1989, Ghana) was the recipient of the 2021 second runner up prize of the Inaugural Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize in Africa by Gallery 1957 and also the recipient of the 2017 first runner up prize of the prestigious Kuenyehia Art Prize for Contemporary Art in Ghana, respectively. Her work, ‘The Shrine’ is in the permanent collections of the Kuenyehia Trust, ‘Connecting the Why and the Not’ is also in the permanent collections of the European Union Delegation to Ghana.

Her work has been included in publications and exhibitions such as the MasterCard Foundation’s Art Book Hope, Energy and Ingenuity: Voices of African Youth (2018), Women as the Centre: Art X Feminism, Nubuke Foundation, Accra (2020), Urban Future, Nubuke Foundation, Accra (2020), In Dialogue, Alliance Francaise Accra (2021), Ruins, Space and Expression: The Ruins of Our ‘Self’, Notre Galerie, (2021), Look at We, Nubuke Foundation (2021), Atrium Installations, Wood Society of the Art, Dubia Expo (2021), All Africa Festival by Efie Gallery, Burj Plaza, Dubia Expo (2021), Monologue of Voices, Takoradi, Ghana (2021).

Curators

Nantume Violet (b 1987, Masaka)

Artist, curator and researcher based at UNDER GROUND Contemporary Art Space. She has a Masters in Fine Arts from HFBK Hamburg and currently lives between Kampala and Berlin. Her curatorial interests are tertiary arts education, collaborative artistic practices, and Uganda’s modern art archives.

Julia Gyemant (b 1983, Budapest)

Julia Gyemant is an independent curator, researcher and writer loosely based on herself. She is a long-term collaborator of Taswir projects and currently lives between Berlin and Kampala. In her work she engages poetic writing as an epistemological framework and methodology.

With the support of ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

CLOSE’ Exhibition 24^th May to 24^th June 2018

Venue: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Johannesburg South Africa

Collaborators: !Kauru Art Project and UNDER GROUND

Curators: Nantume Violet (Uganda), Zingisa Nkonsinkulu (South Africa), Nyambura Waruingi (Kenya)

Featured the works of 11 artists

https://fb.watch/1LxKxG2JO6/

“CLOSE” was explores in relation to human experiences.‘CLOSE’ relating to proximity, and can refer to ‘tension-ridden’ space between, or even within humans. It illuminates experiences of ambivalence, delirium and entanglement. The exhibition interrogated tension as a critical moment of reflection on the liminal spaces between things and beings, between sex and desire. The exhibition featured contemporary artworks exploring themes of proximity, intimacy, personal space, tension, between things, perspiration, violence, discomfort, gender binaries, and breathlessness.

The space between the female body narrative and that of the male has grown exponentially. In the ‘a-woke-ning’ of sensitivities to ‘femaleness’ that has erupted in the world over the last few years, we have begun to recalibrate, redefine and re-measure this state of ‘closeness’. But there is still an element of discomfort shrouding the engagement with these subjects. The Exhibition saw casting a light on this very discomfort as a way of dismantling the social and psychological barriers that impede our access to the other. The project sought to rupture the fabric of society in order to find space to breathe and speak about tension. Although the concept of closeness can be explored in a personal, more self-reflective mode, the artists strove to bring us closer to the more nuanced, contextualized questions, and presented artworks which critiqued dominant perceptions and proffered different views from the spaces they occupied.

Being Her(e) Exhibition 24^th Nov 2017 to 31^st Jan 2018

Venue: Banco Economico Gallery. Luanda, Angola

Collaborators: !Kauru Art Project, Beyond Entropies Africa, This is not a white cube Gallery, UNDER GROUND

Curators: Nantume Violet (Uganda) and Paula Nanscimento (Angola/Portugal)

Featured the works of 11 artists

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

The project is part of a sequence of exhibitions that had been organized by !Kauru Art Project from 2016 on a wide array of themes including sexuality, femininity, and various forms of human relationships in Africa. Being Her(e), extended the conversation started in 2016 with Being and Becoming: Complexities of the African Identity, an exhibition organized by !Kauru Art Project, which focused on questions around the ‘layerdness’ of our identit(ies) and on the urgency of forging new and even unorthodox ways of seeing and being African.

Featuring works of 14 female artists from the African continent and diaspora, Being Her(e) examines the historical and contemporary perceptions of what it means to have/be a female body in contemporary Africa. The double interplay in the title implies not only a presence denoted through time and space- being here – but also an irrefutable and defiant individuality of female presence, which articulates itself in the individuality of presence – being her.

Drawing from a social historiography of the body, particularly the female body, Being Her(e) proffers a candid reflection on the “mythification” of the female body, reenacting and performing ‘woman’ and femaleness. It does so by exploring several themes relating to the social construction of ‘femaleness”, themes ranging from gender, to agency, subjectivity, memory, belonging, sexuality, and identity. The exhibition invokes the body as a locus – an intimate and collective space and a site for social and political inscription, where history is contested, and fantasies are played out. It also addresses the constraints and impacts of temporality and spatiality on transitions from girlhood into womanhood within the African cosmology. Furthermore, we consider notions of (self-) representation and what it means to live and leave, and ideas of memory and personal geographies.

Being Her(e) examines, confronts, and contextualizes challenges that sometimes define the social (cultural), historical and contemporary notions of what it means to be/have a female body in Africa as well as the African diaspora. It questions preconceived ideas about womanhood and femaleness, opening up scope for broader reflection on the theme of identity and its representations.

Being Her(e): Meditations on African Femininities Exhibition May to June 2017

Venue: Constitutional Hill. Johannesburg – South Africa

Collaborators: !Kauru Art Project and UNDER GROUND.

Curators: Refilwe Nkomo (South Africa), Thato Mogotsi (South Africa), Mentored by Nantume Violet (Uganda) and Paula Nanscimento (Angola/Portugal)

Featuring works of 13 artists, the exhibition Being Her(e): Meditations on African Femininities, essentially constituted a multifaceted guided tours by curators. Being Her(e) examines and interrogates the complexities of what has come to be understood as African femininities and the narratives of femininity emanating from contemporary African and African diasporic experiences. This theme is further interrogated from the perspective of gender and sexuality, particularly in the wake of the spotlight in 2017 on sex-related violence against women in South Africa. Sexuality is still a highly contested subject, often shrouded by a thick veil of socially imposed sanctions and silence, and is understood in a peculiar way in South Africa/Africa and across the world. Within the African continent South Africa is perceived to be more liberal for being a constitutionally representative nation that respects the rights and sexual preferences of its citizens. In other parts of the continent this is not usually the case, hence the many questions of the several ways in which socialization of sexuality is expressed across the continent.

Indulgence: Fluidities, Possibilities, Evolutions 6^th April to 24^th May 2018

Venue: Goethe Zentrum Nairobi Kenya

Collaborators: UNDER GROUND and Broken Metatarsal Productions

Curators: Nantume Violet (Uganda), Nyambura Waruingi (Kenya)

Featured the works of 6 artists

Indulgence Exhibition is a trans-disciplinary journey weaving multiple reflections on sexualities, genders, and desires and exploring their fluidities, contestations, and evolutions. Featuring photography, installations, sculpture, erotica, and video, this multi-media exhibition experiments with notions of art as exploration, with the artists presenting their ideas in various stages of development, thus reliving with the audiences, the intense journey of creating art. Indulgence showcases works from East African artists— Yaye Kassamali, James Muriuki, Stacey Gillian Abe, Henry ‘Mzili’ Mujunga, and Neo Musangi.

The artists seek to deconstruct and penetrate the persistent boundaries of social constructions of ‘femaleness’, desire, and pleasure. The artists explore questions about performance of masculinities, shame and sexuality, and about non-binary gender identities. Indulgence plays with and reflects upon the dynamisms and fluidities in our societies, which are often dismissed as un-African, un-natural, or against ‘culture’. It wrestles with language to develop its own lexicon. And even while exploring contemporary notions of these concepts, it never loses sight of the contextualities of their origins. The idea is to produce an understanding of the female that is at once contemporary and ‘homegrown’ (rooted in the experience of being female in Africa).

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Eroticism and Intimacy II

FNB Joburg Art Fair 2016 Johannesburg, South Africa

09 Sep 2016 – 11 Sep 2016

The exhibition aims to create spaces and platforms where people can critically and actively scrutinize issues relating to gender and sexuality in the public domain and to be able to express their views freely. East Africa, and in particular Uganda, has come to represent the preeminent abuse of both gender and sexuality across Africa, and internationally, through various public law enforcement and mobilized acts of violence.

Acts associated with non-traditional sexualities are either criminalized or highly stigmatized. Various reports show the inhumane approach to women and queer bodies. Matters of gender and sexuality have become a political as much as cultural debate. This edition of Eroticism and Intimacy at the JoburgArtFair 2016 seeks to engage with the controversies surrounding sex in the twin arenas of religion and culture. This takes place against the backdrop of society’s current moral perspectives on the subject of sexuality.

The Joburg edition will build on the Body Pedagogy workshops that took place during the first Eroticism and Intimacy exhibition in Kampala in March 2016. The workshops were designed and facilitated by Moses Serubiri together with Rebecca Rwakabukoza as the moderator. The workshops provided a discursive and pedagogical environment for academics, writers, critics, artists, activists, and opinion leaders in society to explore the body’s relation to gender and sexuality. The workshops generated reflections on and contributed useful ideas to the subject while attempting to apply these to the sex politics of culture and religion in East Africa.

Eroticism, sexual desire, intimacy and familiarity (or friendship)are central themes in the inquiry of this project. Moral attitudes in society are largely influenced by religious and cultural teachings, which beg the questions: How are gender and sexuality perceived in relation to the body? How do we reveal or conceal sexual desire in relation to our own bodies or with other people? How have we explored the paths to places of intimacy and eroticism even when they fall far outside the bounds of society’s moral outlook and expectations?

While the faces, places and paths that relate to intimacy and sexual desire are innumerable, oftentimes women and men are paralyzed and unable to explore these options due to the moral attitudes of society towards intimacy, attitudes that are bred by both culture and religion. The clash between eroticism and these attitudes limit the adventurous expression of sexual desire, and curtail the exploration of intimacy as women and men choose to follow the beaten path

Eleven artworks by four artists will be on display at the fair. Whereas the themes are bound to attract a degree of controversy, we are optimistic that these selected artworks will spark a public and personal desire among the viewers to strip away their negative views about alternative paths to eroticism and thus be able to freely partake of and enjoy unbridled intimacy.