“The distance Between Yesterday and Tomorrow”

“The Distance Between Yesterday and Tomorrow” is a group exhibition exploring notions of African identity through the works of contemporary East African artists including Sungi Mlengeya, Tahir Carl Karmali, Lemek Tompoika, Eria Nsubuga Sane, Agnes Waruguru, Migadde Adrian, and Aloka Trevor. Exploring themes of memory, migration, place, and gender, the entire exhibition aims to dialogue with present-day events and past happenings in hopes of imagining alternative realities in the future.

Working with various media, each artist in this exhibition dialogues with the complexities of the African identity, and challenges the preconceived notion of what it means to be African. The exhibition examines the multiple understanding of what it means to be African within historical and political context. The works are critical representations of current political and cultural realities.

While there have been several conversations surrounding African identity in the past decades both by Africans on the continent and the diaspora, and foreign attempts to construct and reconstruct understandings of being African. This quest for identity formation and reformation in itself is historical. It is worthy of note that the historical experience of the African with the West, starting with the slavery is fundamental to the negative conception of what Africans should be as a people, country or a continent. The degrading effect of slavery which led to utter denigration of African culture was followed and reinforced by colonialism; a complete process dehumanization. Thus, Africa was presented as a continent without history, geography, literature, culture, civilization, and art.