Art and gender : imag[in]ing the new woman in contemporary Ugandan art (2025)

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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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Aesthetics of Articulation

Fiona Siegenthaler

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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

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Amanda Tumusiime

African Arts, 2018

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Art and gender : imag[in]ing the new woman in contemporary Ugandan art (2025)

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