“To move is to survive; to create is to remember.”
Ugandan Art on the Move represents a critical crossroads in the narrative of contemporary East African visual expression. Brought together by the Uganda Artists Association within the historic, enduring walls of Nommo Gallery, this exhibition functions as both a celebration and an excavation. It charts the physical, emotional, and conceptual journeys of a creative community that refuses to remain static.
For decades, Ugandan visual art has lived at the intersection of profound transitions; navigating the delicate lines between inherited ancestral traditions, colonial disruption, post-independence anxieties, and the rapid, unrelenting acceleration of modern urban life. The works presented in this collection; spanning painting, sculpture, batik, and mixed media, do not treat heritage as a fixed museum artifact. Instead, they position culture as a living, breathing archive that shifts, adapts, and travels through the bodies and minds of its practitioners.
The title Ugandan Art on the Move carries a dual urgency. It speaks directly to the shifting geographies of our people, our landscapes, and our social realities. Here, the canvas becomes a site of transition:
- Landscape as Process: Shorelines are documented not as idyllic postcard scenery, but as provisional edges shaped by human labour, economic migration, and climate adaptation.
- The Urban and the Civic: Megacities and local townships are captured under the pressure of vertical expansion, heavily wired and layered with competing memories.
- The Body as Architecture: Figurative works and portraits assert a quiet, self-possessed dignity, showcasing how identity is carried, adorned, and performed across changing times.
Formally, the exhibition thrives on creative friction. Bold, heavy painterly strokes and vibrant, explosive colour palettes stand in direct conversation with moments of profound compositional restraint, soft lighting, and raw, organic textures. By stripping away unnecessary staging, the participating artists invite the viewer into an intimate, honest dialogue with the materials; asking us to actively read the structural contradictions of survival and aspiration embedded within the surfaces.
In an era where the physical and cultural markers of our past are constantly being remade by external forces, Ugandan Art on the Move refuses cheap nostalgia or simple environmental lament. It does not mourn a vanishing Uganda with sentimental tears. Instead, it asserts that presence itself is a form of resistance and strength.
As a collective declaration, this exhibition captures a creative community in mid-stride. It leaves the viewer with a profound sense of a world suspended between passage and preservation; proving that even when the horizon shifts and the land moves beneath our feet, the artist’s line remains an unshakeable anchor.