The Kampala Art Biennale is the Ugandan biennial of contemporary African art, founded 2014 by the artist, gallerist and curator Daudi Karungi through the Kampala Arts Trust. Across its first four editions — Progressive Africa (2014), Seven Hills (2016), The Studio (2018) and Get Up Stand Up — the programme has built the working argument that a continuing pan-African contemporary art platform can operate from East Africa outside the older Dak'Art / Bamako axis, on a curatorial model that has moved successively from group survey to thematic essay to a master-and-apprentice studio.
The Kampala Art Biennale (KAB) is Uganda's biennial of contemporary African art, founded in 2014 in the East African capital by the artist, gallerist and curator Daudi Karungi through the Kampala Arts Trust — the artists' coalition Karungi co-founded in 2007 alongside the criticism journal START Journal and as the institutional partner to his Afriart Gallery (founded 2002). The biennial was conceived, in Karungi's framing, as a showcase of contemporary art from Africa with the aim to expose, educate and create debate about the value of art in Ugandan society — and as the East African pole of a pan-African contemporary art conversation that, at the founding moment, was institutionally anchored on Dakar's DAK'ART (1990) in the West African Atlantic and on the Bamako Encounters of African Photography (1994) in the Sahel, with no continuing equivalent on the continent's eastern axis.
Across its first four editions, the Kampala Art Biennale has moved through three distinct curatorial models. The inaugural edition, Progressive Africa, opened in August 2014 as a survey-format presentation of contemporary African painting, sculpture, photography and installation distributed across Kampala venues, with Karungi himself curating from the Kampala Arts Trust. The second edition, Seven Hills, ran from 3 September to 2 October 2016 under the curatorship of the independent curator Elise Atangana (Yaoundé / Paris) — known for her co-curatorship of the 2014 Dakar Biennale — who took the seven hills on which the East African capital is built as her organising metaphor, working with twenty-five international contemporary artists across a network of venues and with the sub-theme of virtual mobilities: the question of what it means to circulate, to migrate and to be seen from elsewhere in a contemporary African city. The third edition, The Studio, opened on 24 August 2018 and ran to 24 September under a curatorial libretto by the Cameroonian critic Simon Njami (long-time co-editor of Revue Noire; curator of the 2016 and 2018 Dakar Biennales), who replaced the conventional thematic-group format with a master-and-apprentice studio model: seven internationally established African artists — Abdoulaye Konaté, Bili Bidjocka, Godfried Donkor, Myriam Mihindou, Radenko Milak, Aida Muluneh and Pascale Marthine Tayou — opened studios in Kampala over consecutive ten-day intensive workshops, with selected young Ugandan, East African and African apprentices working alongside each master. The fourth edition, Get Up Stand Up, again with Njami as librettist, closed the institution's first cycle.
An institution carried by a gallerist, a journal and a trust
The structural feature that distinguishes the Kampala Art Biennale from the older continental biennials at Dakar and Bamako, and from its near-neighbour the East Africa Art Biennale (EASTAFAB, founded 2003 in Dar es Salaam), is the architecture of the institution that carries it. Where DAK'ART is a Senegalese state institution operating under the Ministry of Culture, and the Bamako Encounters are an intergovernmental programme run between the Malian state and the French Institut Français, and EASTAFAB is registered as a Tanzanian non-profit headquartered at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Kampala Art Biennale runs from a Ugandan artists' coalition — the Kampala Arts Trust — which Karungi co-founded in 2007 and which works through the existing infrastructure of his Afriart Gallery on Kampala's Lugogo Bypass, the editorial network of START Journal, and a working relationship with international funders including the EU Delegation in Kampala, the TotalEnergies Foundation and other diplomatic and corporate cultural sponsors.
The artistic argument the Kampala programme makes is that pan-African contemporary art does not need a continental capital to organise around it. The 2016 Seven Hills edition framed Kampala's urban geography — the named hills of Mengo, Kibuli, Namirembe, Lubaga, Nsambya, Nakasero and Old Kampala, with the city's expansion now folding in further hills around the original seven — as a working diagram for thinking about virtual mobility, migration and the dispersed contemporary African subject. The 2018 Studio edition then reframed the biennial form itself: rather than a thematic exhibition assembled from completed works, KAB18 took the biennial's two-year cycle as a transmission medium, with seven established masters each spending ten days in residence with selected apprentices, and the resulting works — and the relationships between the artists — constituting the exhibition. The argument was that the master-and-apprentice studio, which the European canon long treated as a pre-modern practice, has in fact continued in African artistic training across the twentieth century and into the present, and that the biennial form could productively be turned toward that continuing tradition rather than against it. The 2020 closing edition, Get Up Stand Up, again under Njami as librettist, made the political argument the institution had not yet directly made — that contemporary African art is not a separate object of curatorial attention but an active position within the wider African political and cultural project.
