Urban Canvasses depict Kampala’s visual culture

The exhibition prompts conversations around the city’s vibrant visual culture, social cultural realities of everyday life and the complex question on who owns the city.

ARTS |  Dominic Muwanguzi | Everyone in Kampala and its neighbourhood has at least interfaced with a poster, billboard, signage, banner or graffiti inscription. These images often carry diverse messages ranging from warnings to adverts promoting a wide range of products or facilities to activism campaigns and sex sells. Their messages alongside the manner of presentation in a public space like Kampala city depict the sociocultural fabric of the urbanites who are the target audience. The exhibition Urban Canvasses, a display of printed photographic images of posters, banners, signage, billboards and graffiti around different parts of Kampala symbolizes the city’s visual culture that is inspired by the urbanites’ everyday living. By its identity, Kampala is one of the fastest-growing cities on the African continent, with an ever-increasing population of urban dwellers that contribute to the chaotic nature of the city’s landscape. This chaotic element of the city is what permeates through these photographs that henceforth, the viewer is gripped by their messy and disorderly composition; a powerful metaphor for Kampala and its urbanites.

The setting of the exhibition in a curated space, the Makerere art gallery, creates a sense of sanity in these images. The images are categorised in different sections, including shop signs, warnings, billboards, event banners, artistic murals and removed images. This orderly presentation allows the viewer to engage with the photographs deeply, drawing on their familiar locations and messages that they carry that are or can be relatable to the viewer. For example, the image taken of a commercial building site downtown with signages on the site hoarding that are hard to read from the street either because they are faded or too small immediately conjures the many random building sites springing up in the city that pose serious inconveniences to pedestrians and motorists. In particular, the very nature of these signages speaks to the informal and almost inept nature of Kampala urban dwellers and workers. This reality is further represented in the photographs of loosely hanging signages on billboards , dirty banners standing grotesquely atop tall buildings and  that image of boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) packed next to the No Parking Signage.

But these images also subtly add their voice to the looming question of who owns the city? Is it the Kampala City Council Authority that is mandated by law to govern and administer the city or the urban dwellers who live and work here but also pay taxes? The dilemma that surrounds this ownership of the city is clearly evident in the warning signs that variously read: No Posters’, ‘No Parking’, ‘No Idlers’, ‘No Dumping’ and ‘No Stopping’ that are placed either on public or private property. These signs compete for a voice of authority by both the city’s planning authority (KCCA) and the landlords amidst a public that perceives such restraint as a form of infringement on their freedoms. Often the result of such confusion is the violation of the message put forward by these signs, symbolizing the perennial tension that exists between the city council authority, private landlords and the public.

The photographic images on showcase carry a multiplicity of textures of Kampala’s social cultural landscape and the need for expression by the city’s diverse populace. The mass production of these objects on an everyday basis suggest an insatiable appetite for their consumption by urban dwellers, but also the  urgency by their authors to communicate and connect with a society that is so swallowed up by the social economic hardships of a modern city like Kampala. The image of Stecia writing – a probable pseudonym that advertises commercial sex services to potential clients – that is conspicuous on the surfaces of many street corners around Kampala underscores the growing demand for such leisurely activities in a society that is marked with broken families brought about by financial distress.

This exhibition, as the curator, Prof. Angelo Kakande writes in the curatorial note, “…aims to broaden the discourse within Kampala’s urban culture to engage deeply with critical contemporary issues such as human rights, eco-activism, and the complex political and economic realities that influence the visual landscape of Kampala city…” As such, this showcase is more than timely, as the city’s authority embarks on different interventions to upgrade the space to “international standards” amidst a litany of challenges embedded in its sociocultural fabric that cannot be ignored but must be confronted, as the huge volume of banners, posters and graffiti depict.

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The exhibition Urban Canvasses: Kampala’s Visual Culture Through Posters is curated by Prof. Angelo Kakande of the College of Engineering Design, Art and Technology, Makerere University in collaboration with Dr. Sabina Andron and Miti Kinaawola. The exhibition is open at the Makerere Art gallery.