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Conveying the Mallet: Barkcloth Renewal and Connectedness in Fred Mutebi’s Art Practice
Margaret Nagawa
Critical interventions, 2018
In Uganda, rural-urban and art-craft categories are used, carrying value judgments that assign indigenous art forms to rural practitioners and art to urban. Artist Fred Kato Mutebi's practice breaks this dichotomy revitalizing barkcloth making in rural Kibinge, merging it with woodcut printing and painting in his Kampala studio. In this article, I examine Mutebi's practice by tracing the cultural history of barkcloth while discussing particular objects within his social, cultural, geographic, and artistic practice. I argue that the notion of classification, as inherited from colonial systems, separates objects from their histories by foregrounding hierarchy while ignoring the shifting nature of place, meaning, and technique. By scrutinizing how notional lines between art and craft are produced, I shed new light on the rarely acknowledged complexity and contradictions surrounding barkcloth as an art form that transgresses the rural-urban divide and the craft-art binary in contemporary production.
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Up Close and Far Away: Renarrating Buganda's Troubled Past
Sidney Kasfir
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Alex Baine'sWomen's Emancipation in Uganda
Amanda Tumusiime
African Arts, 2017
A lex Baine is a contemporary Ugandan woman artist who graduated from the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art (or MTSIFA) in 1989. 1 During her final year, she painted a large work, Women's Emancipation in Uganda (Fig. ) (1989), in which she represented women in domestic and nondomestic (conventional and unconventional) economies, spaces, and histories. Baine has not produced any other painting since her graduation. 2 It is evident that Baine's art career, like those of several other female graduates of the Art School, has been interrupted by many issues including family, business, further education, and diversion into other professions. 3 However, in this article I acknowledge that she championed women's emancipation in Uganda's contemporary art in the 1980s, a debate that I trace in her work. Baine painted Women's Emancipation in Uganda under the instruction of Francis Musangogwantamu (1923Musangogwantamu ( -2007)), who himself was a student of Margaret Trowell from 1954 to 1958. Baine explains that: Most of the time he would set topics [for us], however during our third year we were told to choose our favourite topics and this is how I chose to paint Women's Emancipation in Uganda as an important history in women's lives. 4 1 Alex Baine Women's Emancipation in Uganda (1989) Oil on canvas, 164 cm x 102 cm Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) collection, Kampala
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Art Practice as a Field of Articulatory Engagements: Fred Mutebi's Promotion of Barkcloth in Local and Global Networks
Fiona Siegenthaler
Aesthetics of Articulation. Basel Papers on Political Transformations, 2019
This essay presents a major project of artist Fred Kato Mutebi that involves a particularly high and diverse number of stakeholders, aesthetic traditions, entrepreneurial initiatives and social engagement. Known since the beginning of his career as an inventive and experimental artist, university-trained master printer Fred Mutebi started some years ago to explore the ecological, technological, aesthetic, cultural, political, social and economic potential of barkcloth, a culturally significant material with a long tradition in Buganda. By promoting the production of barkcloth, facilitating training opportunities, opening up new creative markets, and emphasising the sustainability and cultural value of barkcloth, he successfully links different local, national and international discourses within his practice as an artist and as a social entrepreneur. I argue that Mutebi disposes of a particular mastery in creating moments that render possible articulatory practices, and he does so with regard to different conceptual understandings of articulation. Similar to many other artists in African cities, he has developed a particular repertoire of discourses and cultural as well as artistic practices that feed into a variety of markets and stakeholder interests. As articulatory practice, this repertoire enables him to secure, expand, and source quite flexibly from several economic contexts and constituencies and helps him to operate from a flexible and likewise reliable range of positions to implement his visions.
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The place of 'Library, Archives and Museum' in the Preservation of Documentary Heritage: A professional challenge for Uganda
Elisam Magara
2006
Information represented by a signal generated in a communications medium by a first entity is recovered by receiving the signal from the communications medium at a second entity, determining a mobility characteristic for communications between the first entity and the second entity, and adaptively estimating the information from the received signal based on the determined mobility characteristic. The mobility characteristic may be received from the first entity at the second entity, and the information represented by the received signal may be adaptively estimated based on the received mobility characteristic. According to an embodiment of the invention, the mobility characteristic is a cell type identifier which is communicated from a base station to a mobile terminal, the mobile terminal adaptively estimating information from a signal received from the base station based on the communicated cell type identifier. A number of signal processing functions may be adaptively performed, ...
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The Power of Art in Promoting Consciousness, Dialogue, and to Inspire
Sherry Erskine, Kitto Derrick
ARTLAB Africa Residence, 2019
A catalogue of Art experiments for artists-in-residence at Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design in Uganda, in 2019. The experiments were carried out in both learning and casual spaces. The artworks produced range from Painting, Photography, Videography, Performance, Installation art and Waste recycling
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From War Cacophonies to Rhythms of Peace: Popular Music in Post -986 Uganda
Richard Ssewakiryanga
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Aesthetics of Articulation
Fiona Siegenthaler
2019
Art and social space are not conceivable one without another. Nevertheless, only little research has so far addressed this relationship of creative and social practice and its political and aesthetic implications in urban Africa and its global entanglement. Often, art is conceived either as apolitical practice of beautification and decoration in times of peace or as deeply political in times of unrest and oppression. This applies particularly to African settings that tend to be perceived as sites of crisis while evading the attention of mostly Western-centric art theory. It is therefore of particular importance to understand artistic articulation as a social and creative practice that operates also beyond moments of political and conflictual emergency. In what ways does art articulate social and political imagination, and how does artistic practice relate to such social and collective visions? How does articulation work and in what ways is it generative of visual, oral and performat...
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Rethinking the state in Idi Amin's Uganda: The Politics of Exhortation
Edgar C Taylor
Journal of Eastern African Studies , 2013
Derek R. Peterson and Edgar C. Taylor This essay—the introduction to a collection of essays on Idi Amin’s Uganda—illuminates the infrastructure of Amin’s dictatorship. It was through the technology of the news media that Amin’s officials found it possible to summon and direct the actions of Uganda’s people. The news media’s apparently extensive audience made it possible for the authorities to address particular demographic groups who would otherwise fall outside the reach of government bureaucracy. When government officials did actually engage with the real people they addressed, they did so with measuring tapes and typewriters close at hand. In the paper reports they filed, Amin’s bureaucrats tidied up complicated social situations, generating statistics that illuminated a particular constituency’s adherence to—or deviation from—the official directive. Uganda’s command economy was constituted through exhortations, inflated statistics, and other fictions on paper.
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“Our Voice of Africa”: It Is Less Than Our Voice Without a Woman's Voice
Amanda Tumusiime
African Arts, 2018
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