Art Punch Studios in Kampala - Four Emerging Artists Interviewed

Here is a video of four emerging artists from the Capital of Uganda, Kampala:

Click on this photograph of Wasswa Donald to see the video.

Technology Meet Africa! Wasswa Donald Curates | Opening Statement by Joe Pollitt

Technology Meet Africa! Wasswa Donald Curates

WELCOME TO OUR ONLINE MINI EXPO | A VISUAL UPRISING FROM KAMPALA, UGANDA.

The passion for this show stems from an overwhelming desire to create positive media for Artists from Africa via Social Media Networks. Working in collaboration with a young, dynamic Ugandan artist from Kampala, Wasswa Donald, together we have chartered out a different course in which to sail. Helped by our various friends around the world, we have tried to break the mould of those favoured few and open up the spectrum to a far greater audience; both from those participating and those observing. Presently, the artistic practitioners within the Continent have little, if any say in their own contemporary cultural development; with the slight exception of Nigeria, North and South Africa. Galleries, Private Collectors, Museums and Art Institutions throughout the western world are defining Africa without asking the Africans. Europe and America are developing highbrow exhibitions that have no reflection on Africa Now – A Continent of Artists working without sufficient patronage or adequate fiscal support. Wasswa and I are ambitiously creating platforms for the rejected, unaccepted African artistic elite. Together, we are all creating new ways of seeing and brand new waves of being an Artist in Africa. In this era of New Media things are about to change for the better and open up various avenues for those that dare to be an Artist!

Art is a powerful force; an energy that can inspire a generation. The spirit of art takes shape organically, creating common threads - a Riot in the making with direction but no director or dictator; setting fire to the hearts and minds of all those participating. It is the collective, voicing feelings long since silenced.  Sending clear messages out to those discontented masses to soothe their aching lives. No group on earth would know this better than those living in black Africa.  For those that live on the periphery, the marginalised and rejected majority: For those that work so thanklessly, pushing aside mediocrity and striving forward to fight for the right to have their say. Those courageous enough to continue despite years of neglect.  All in the same vein of being seen, in some affirmative way, as progressive.

The purpose of this exercise and its ultimate goal, is to create an authentic virtual mini artistic revolution by creating an active yet invisible Museum. A Museum without windows or doors; without ceilings or floors. Randomly posting: Online Mini-Shows; Mini-Group Exhibitions; Mini Expos and Solo Shows from all the overlooked and underseen artists of Africa. All the artists that are interested in participating are encouraged to self-publish a book on the Blurb website to be housed in the African Library | www.africanlibrary.blogspot.com. This will allow Institutions around the Globe a rare glimpse and a mesmerizing insight into Africa on a far more personal level; inevitably enlightening an alternative perspective on what Contemporary Africa Art truly is: a panoramic view, as seen from the artists living and working from within. Wasswa Donald and I, would like to thank all those who have supported us in both Kampala and the UK and to Wasswa Donald - thank you so very much for agreeing to be a little crazy with me – It takes great courage to expose yourself as we have done...so we ask you all to join us in our expose and enjoy the weeks ahead. Wish us luck and get involved in our Mini Artistic Revolution.

Ugandan Video Uprising | As Seen On Youtube.


Thank you all for watching! X

*N.B. Special thanks go out to Ceris Dien, Shiela Black, Kate von Achen, Paul Hardcastle, Kathy Goodell, Prince Babs Epega, Najet Belkhodja, Mona Douf, Joel Nankin, Miss Kitty, Octavio Zaya, Tracey Rose, Simon Wajcenberg, Bud Rose, Melonie Kastman and Emma Youngs for your constant love and support. Cheers Big Ears. X

Technology Meet Africa | Curator Wasswa Donald

Click here to take a look at the book.


Here is a book attached to the first Online Mini Expo on African Artists Inc.Online Mini Expo into the Art of Uganda.

This is the first of many: An Online Expo into that artists of Uganda from the perspective of a young artist living and working in Kampala. Wasswa Donald.

The Mini Exhibition will be shown through The African Well on Youtube and through various other websites that focus on Contemporary African Art. The show outlines the expectations of the young artists of Uganda and gives a slight insight into the Contemporary History of Art of the country. The date is 18th August 2011 and will run for a month. A book will accompany the Mini show or Expo, that has been developed through the Blurb website.
Hopefully this will develop an effective way to show up-and-coming artists from within the Continent and educate all of us to History of Art of a Continent by those within it. The intent is to expose of the artistic heroes of Africa by the Africans.

Join in and watch the works and words of the artists from Kampala, Uganda on Facebook.

Chris Abani | Graceland

From Publishers Weekly

Abani's debut novel offers a searing chronicle of a young man's coming of age in Nigeria during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The vulnerable, wide-eyed protagonist is Elvis Oke, a young Nigerian with a penchant for dancing and impersonating the American rock-and-roll singer he is named after. The story alternates between Elvis's early years in the 1970s, when his mother dies of cancer and leaves him with a disapproving father, and his life as a teenager in the Lago ghetto, a place one character calls "a pus-ridden eyesore on de face of de nation's capital." Relating how an innocent child grows into a hardened young man, the novel also gives a glimpse into a world foreign to most readers-a brutal Third World country permeated by the excesses and wonders of American popular culture. Sprinkled throughout the book are recipes and entries from Elvis's mother's journal, as well as descriptions of the kola nut ceremony through which an Igbo boy becomes a man. These sections at first seem showy and tacked on, but by the end of the book their significance becomes clearer. The book is most powerful when it refrains from polemic and didacticism and simply follows its protagonist on his daily journey through the violent, harsh Nigerian landscape. Elvis must also negotiate troubles closer to home, including a drunk and ruined father and friends who cannot always be trusted. In this book, names are destiny, "selected with care by your family and given to you as a talisman." One of Elvis's friends is named Redemption, but in the end it is Elvis who claims this moniker, both literally and symbolically.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Elvis Oke, a teenage Elvis impersonator in Lagos, Nigeria, attempts to come of age in spite of an alcoholic father who beats him and a soul-crushing ghetto environment that threatens to engulf him. Beset by floods, vermin, and the ubiquitous Colonel, chief of military security in Lagos, Elvis lives from day to day, saturated by a bizarrely out of date, misunderstood version of American pop culture and remembering his life in the country before his mother died and his father lost his career. Immigration to the U.S. is Elvis' dream, shared by his underworld friend, Redemption, although their notion of America comes mainly from untranslated, decades-old movies, all of which are interpreted only in terms of the conflict between John Wayne (all good guys) and Actor (everyone else). The novel offers a vibrant picture of an alien yet somehow parallel culture, and while the plot runs off the rails from time to time, the mix of surrealistic horror and cross-cultural humor is irresistible. Abani is a first novelist with a very bright future. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Abani's intensely visual style--and his sense of humor--convert the stuff of hopelessness into the stuff of hope."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Extraordinary...This book works brilliantly in two ways. As a convincing and unpatronizing record of life in a poor Nigerian slum, and as a frighteningly honest insight into a world skewed by casual violence, it's wonderful...And for all the horrors, there are sweet scenes in Graceland too, and they're a thousand times better for being entirely unsentimental...Lovely." --The New York Times Book Review

"To say that this is a Nigerian or African novel is to miss the point. This absolutely beautiful work of fiction is about complex strained political structures, the irony of the West being a measure of civilization, and the tricky business of being a son. Abani's language is beautiful and his story is important."--Percival Everett

Book Description

"A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new."--T. Coraghessan Boyle

The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, this is a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

From the Back Cover

"A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new."--T. Coraghessan Boyle

The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, this is a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

"Abani's intensely visual style--and his sense of humor--convert the stuff of hopelessness into the stuff of hope."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Extraordinary...This book works brilliantly in two ways. As a convincing and unpatronizing record of life in a poor Nigerian slum, and as a frighteningly honest insight into a world skewed by casual violence, it's wonderful...And for all the horrors, there are sweet scenes in Graceland too, and they're a thousand times better for being entirely unsentimental...Lovely." --The New York Times Book Review

"To say that this is a Nigerian or African novel is to miss the point. This absolutely beautiful work of fiction is about complex strained political structures, the irony of the West being a measure of civilization, and the tricky business of being a son. Abani's language is beautiful and his story is important."--Percival Everett

Chris Abani was born in Nigeria. At age sixteen he published his first novel, for which he suffered severe political persecution. He went into exile in 1991, and has since lived in England and the United States. His last book, Daphne's Lot, is a collection of poetry for which he won a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the PEN USA West Freedom to Write Award and the Prince Claus Award. Abani lives and teaches in Los Angeles. 

About the Author

Chris Abani was born in Nigeria. At age sixteen he published his first novel, for which he suffered severe political persecution. He went into exile in 1991, and has since lived in England and the United States. His last book, Daphne's Lot, is a collection of poetry for which he won a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the PEN USA West Freedom to Write Award and the Prince Claus Award. Abani lives and teaches in Los Angeles. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from GraceLand by Chris Abani. Copyright © 2004 by Christopher Abani. To be published in February, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


Book I

It seemed almost incidental that he was African.
So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years . . .
—BESSIE HEAD,
A Question of Power



ONE

This is the kola nut. This seed is a star. This star is life. This star is us.

The lgbo hold the kola nut to be sacred, offering it at every gathering and to every visitor, as a blessing, as refreshment, or to seal a covenant. The prayer that precedes the breaking and sharing of the nut is: He who brings kola, brings life.


Lagos, 1983

Elvis stood by the open window. Outside: heavy rain. He jammed the wooden shutter open with an old radio battery, against the wind. The storm drowned the tinny sound of the portable radio on the table. He felt claustrophobic, fingers gripping the iron of the rusty metal protector. It was cool on his lips, chin and forehead as he pressed his face against it.

Across the street stood the foundations of a building; the floor and pillars wore green mold from repeated rains. Between the pillars, a woman had erected a buka, no more than a rickety lean-to made of sheets of corrugated iron roofing and plastic held together by hope. On dry evenings, the smell of fried yam and dodo wafted from it into his room, teasing his hunger. But today the fire grate was wet and all the soot had been washed away.

As swiftly as it started, the deluge abated, becoming a faint drizzle. Water, thick with sediment, ran down the rust-colored iron roofs, overflowing basins and drums set out to collect it. Taps stood in yards, forlorn and lonely, their curved spouts, like metal beaks, dripping rain water. Naked children exploded out of grey wet houses, slipping and splaying in the mud, chased by shouts of parents trying to get them ready for school.

The rain had cleared the oppressive heat that had already dropped like a blanket over Lagos; but the smell of garbage from refuse dumps, unflushed toilets and stale bodies was still overwhelming. Elvis turned from the window, dropping the threadbare curtain. Today was his sixteenth birthday, and as with all the others, it would pass uncelebrated. It had been that way since his mother died eight years before. He used to think that celebrating his birthday was too painful for his father, a constant reminder of his loss. But Elvis had since come to the conclusion that his father was simply self-centered. The least I should do is get some more sleep, he thought, sitting on the bed. But the sun stabbed through the thin fabric, bathing the room in sterile light. The radio played Bob Marley's "Natural Mystic," and he sang along, the tune familiar.

"There's a natural mystic blowing through the air / If you listen carefully now you will hear . . ." His voice trailed off as he realized he did not know all the words, and he settled for humming to the song as he listened to the sounds of the city waking up: tin buckets scraping, the sound of babies crying, infants yelling for food and people hurrying but getting nowhere.

Next door someone was playing highlife music on a radio that was not tuned properly. The faster-tempoed highlife distracted him from Bob Marley, irritating him. He knew the highlife tune well, "Ije Enu" by Celestine Ukwu. Abandoning Bob Marley, he sang along:

"Ije enu, bun a ndi n'kwa n'kwa ndi n'wuli n'wuli, eh . . ."

On the road outside, two women bickered. In the distance, the sounds of molue conductors competing for customers carried:

"Yaba! Yaba! Straight!"

"Oshodi! Oshodi! Enter quickly!"

Elvis looked around his room. Jesus Can Save and Nigerian Eagles almanacs hung from stained walls that had not seen a coat of paint in years. A magazine cutting of a BMW was coming off the far wall, its end flapping mockingly. The bare cement floor was a cracked and pitted lunar landscape. A piece of wood, supported at both ends by cinder blocks, served as a bookshelf. On it were arranged his few books, each volume falling apart from years of use.

By the window was a dust-coated desk, and next to it a folding metal chair, brown and crisp with rust. The single camping cot he lay on was sunk in the center and the wafer-thin mattress offered as much comfort as a raffia mat. A wooden bar secured diagonally between two corners of the room served as a closet.

There was a loud knock, and as Elvis gathered the folds of his loincloth around his waist to get up, the lappa, once beautiful but now hole-ridden, caught on the edge of the bed, ripping a curse from him. The book he had fallen asleep reading, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, fell from his side to the floor, the old paperback cracking at the spine, falling neatly into two halves as precisely as if sliced by a sword.

"Elvis! Elvis! Wake up. It's past six in de morning and all your mates are out dere looking for work," his father, Sunday, said.

"What work, sir? I have a job."

"Dancing is no job. We all dance in de bar on Saturday. Open dis bloody door!" Sunday shouted.

Elvis opened the door and eyed him. The desire to drive his fist through his father's face was old and overwhelming.

"I'll just wash, then go," he mumbled, shuffling past Sunday, heading for the backyard, passing Jagua Rigogo, who stood in the middle of the backyard cleaning his teeth with a chewing-stick, preparing for his morning ablutions and the clients who would soon start arriving to consult him on spiritual matters. He reached out and squeezed Elvis's arm as he passed. Elvis turned to him, opening his mouth to speak.

"Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face."

Elvis took in Jagua's dreadlocks, gathered behind him in a long ponytail by a twisted tennis headband, and the distant red glare of his eyes. He didn't have his python with him, and Elvis wondered where it was. Probably asleep in the cot Jagua had salvaged from one of the city dumps, and which sat in the corner of his room. Merlin, his python, slept in it, comfortable as any baby.

"Jagua. I . . ." Elvis began, then stopped.

Jagua smiled, mistaking Elvis's resignation for control.

"Dat's de way," he said.

Elvis just sighed and silently fetched water from the iron drum sunning in a corner of the yard. He snatched his towel off the line and entered the bathroom, trying not to touch the slime-covered walls and the used sanitary pad in the corner. How did they come to this? he wondered. Just two years ago they lived in a small town and his father had a good job and was on the cusp of winning an election. Now they lived in a slum in Lagos. Closing his eyes, he rushed through his morning toilet. On his way back inside to get dressed, he passed his father in the corridor again.

"Are you still here?"

Elvis opened his mouth to answer but thought better of it.

The road outside their tenement was waterlogged and the dirt had been whipped into a muddy brown froth that looked like chocolate frosting. Someone had laid out short planks to carve a path through the sludge. Probably Joshua Bandele-Thomas, Elvis thought. Joshua was the eccentric who lived next door and spent his days pretending to be a surveyor.

Elvis and his father lived at the left edge of the swamp city of Maroko, and their short street soon ran into a plank walkway that meandered through the rest of the suspended city. Even with the planks, the going was slow, as he often had to wait for people coming in the opposite direction to pass; the planks were that narrow.

While he waited, Elvis stared into the muddy puddles imagining what life, if any, was trying to crawl its way out. His face, reflected back at him, seemed to belong to a stranger, floating there like a ghostly head in a comic book. His hair was closely cropped, almost shaved clean. His eyebrows were two perfect arcs, as though they had been shaped in a salon. His dark eyes looked tired, the whites flecked with red. He parted his full lips and tried a smile on his reflection, and his reflection snarled back. Shit, he thought, I look like shit. As he sloshed to the bus stop, one thought repeated in his mind: What do I have to do with all this?

Sitting on the crowded bus, he thought his father might be right; this was no way to live. He was broke all the time, making next to nothing as a street performer. He needed a better job with a regular income. He pulled a book from his backpack and tried to read. It was his current inspirational tome, a well-thumbed copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. He read books for different reasons and had them everywhere he was: one in his backpack, which he called his on-the-road book, usually one that held an inspirational message for him; one by his bed; and one he kept tucked in the hole in the wall in the toilet for those cool evenings when a gentle breeze actually made the smell there bearable enough to stay and read. He opened the book and tried to read, sitting back as far as he could in the narrow seat. He hated the way he was being pressed against the metal side by the heavyset woman sitting next to him, one ample buttock on the seat, the other hanging in the aisle, supported against a standing stranger's leg. Elvis shifted, careful of the loose metal spring poking up through the torn plastic of the seat cover. Giving up on reading, he let his mind drift as he stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent yet beautiful at the same time? he wondered.

He hadn't known about the poverty and violence of Lagos until he arrived. It was as if people conspired with the city to weave a web of silence around its unsavory parts. People who didn't live in Lagos only saw postcards of skyscrapers, sweeping flyovers, beaches and hotels. And those who did, when they returned to their ancestral small towns at Christmas, wore...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Product Details:

• Paperback: 321 pages
• Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc.; 1st Picador Ed edition (8 Mar 2005)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 0312425287
• ISBN-13: 978-0312425289
• Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.9 x 2.3 cm

Dambudzo Marechera | Black Sunlight

Book Description

In an unspecified setting, the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unravelled. In Dambudzo Marechera's second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an 'essential African identity' were often invoked to authorise a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticised upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of 'Euromodernism' and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.

About the Author

Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987), an award-winning Zimbabwean author and poet, has been dismissed by some as mad and applauded by others as a genius. Famous for his unconventional life as much as for his work, more than 20 years after his death Marechera's work continues to inspire academic studies, biographies, films and plays.


Product Details:

• Paperback: 130 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA) (Pty) Ltd (July 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143026208
• ISBN-13: 978-0143026204
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces

Ng˜ugi wa Thiong’o | A Grain of Wheat

Book Description

Originally published in 1967, Ngugi's third novel is his best known and most ambitious work. A Grain of Wheat portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya. As the action follows the village's arrangements for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a novel of stories within stories, a narrative interwoven with myth as well as allusions to real-life leaders of the nationalist struggle, including Jomo Kenyatta. At the centre of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As events unfold, compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed and loves are tested.

About the Author
Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o is the author of WEEP NOT CHILD (1964), THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965), and PETALS OF BLOOD (1977). Ngugi was chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi from 1972 to 1977. He left Kenya in 1982 and taught at various universities in the United States before he became professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University in 1992.


Product Details:

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin in Association with Heinemann African (July 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141186992
• ISBN-13: 978-0141186993
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• 
  

Ng˜ugi wa Thiong’o | The River Between

Review

‘It has rare qualities of restraint, intelligence and sensitivity’

The Times Literary Suppliment

‘ A sensitive novel about Gikuyu in the melting pot that sometimes touches the granduer of tap-root simpliticity.’

The Guardian

Book Description

Explores life on the Makuyu and Kameno ridges of Kenya in the early days of white settlement. Faced with an alluring, new religion and "magical" customs, the Gikuyu people are torn between those who fear the unknown and those who see beyond it.

About the Author

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938,  was educated at the Alliance High School, Kikuyu, at Makerere University, Uganda and at the University of Leeds.
His novel, Weep Not, Child, was published in 1964 and this was followed by The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977). Devil on the Cross (1980), was conceived and written during the author's one-year detention in prison, in Kenya, where he was held without trial after the performance by peasants and workers of his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want).  This was his first work to be published in his own language, Gikutu, and then translated into English and many other languages. His novel Matigari, was published in Gikuyu in Kenya in 1986.

The author has also written collections of short stories, plays and numerous essays. Ngugi is an active campaigner for the African language and form, and he writes, travels and lectures extensively on this theme. His work is known throughout the world and has made powerful impact both at home and overseas.

He now lives and works in the United States, writing and lecturing, and is a Professor at New York University.

Product Details:

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 1 edition (August 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0435905481
• ISBN-13: 978-0435905484
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces