Notes from Kampala’s Fugitive Art Economy

To speak of the art market in Uganda’s capital Kampala is to describe a familiar arrangement: a handful of commercial galleries whose primary audience lives elsewhere but whose exhibitions are generously attended by local artists and a handful of enthusiasts. There is periodic participation in art fairs and the occasional triumphant Instagram post announcing a sale in a city with better lighting. There are also cultural programmes, mainly funded, whose agendas arrive pre-written accompanied by deadlines and the polite expectation of relevance.

The gallery infrastructure, while significant, tends to define the value of works of art through financial exchange, where they travel, and who acquires them regardless of if whether the work ends up in a private or public collection. According to this script, the artist “survives” by entering the financial market or orbiting close enough to it. The farther the work travels, the more it is worth. Ideally, it leaves. But this is only one aspect of the Ugandan art scene.

Across Kampala, often beneath visibility thresholds, artists, curators, writers and patrons have been building a far less obedient economy that is difficult to spreadsheet. It is quieter, slower, occasionally chaotic. It relies on shared studios, borrowed materials, extended conversations and operates through artist-run spaces, informal collectives, camps and workshops, community-enabled residencies, self-published journals, reading groups and improvised exhibitions. It is held together not by contracts but by solidarity; not by sales but by use and the question “what does art do?”. If the formal market is concerned with accumulation, this one is concerned with continuation.

Kampala’s underground art ecology generates a range of interdependent value forms that tend to resist capture. Cultural value lies in the articulation of local imaginaries, histories and sensibilities on their own terms, while intellectual value emerges through critical discourse and theory produced from within practice rather than applied from elsewhere.

Piloya Irene, Nightmares of the Bottom, 2022, video, 4:29 mins. From Metaphors of Reflection, 2023 (Lisa C Soto's Residence, Fumesua, Kumasi). Photo: Ankama Denis Addo © the artist and Lisa C Soto's Residence, Fumesua, Kumasi. Courtesy Nantume Violet

Curatorial value appears in the invention of exhibition formats that exceed – or quietly sidestep – the conventions of the white cube. Historical value, meanwhile, is carried by the careful, often improvised archiving of ephemeral practices, memories and lineages neglected by formal institutions.

Communal value is sustained through networks of care, solidarity and peer support. Pedagogical value unfolds across both formal and informal spaces – workshops, critiques and shared study – while affective value resides in encounters and relations that resist reduction to commodity form.

At the same time, infrastructural value is not given but built, as artists construct the very systems they require: spaces, platforms and publics.

Many artist-led initiatives operate within the gift-form of art and logic – not as naive alternatives to capitalism, but as tactical refusals of its totalising claims by exiting its capital logic. Art, in this sense, is not simply a commodity but a constellation of paradigms, tools and recipes. Shared resources are temporarily held and are continuously reactivated.

The irony is that Kampala’s most vital artistic labour often takes place in conditions that appear, from the outside, as lacking: no major museum, limited project funding, fragmented support systems. It is tempting to read this as a deficiency to be corrected through importation: better models, better structures, better versions of elsewhere.

The response of Ugandan artists to these conditions echoes the quiet defiance of the titular law clerk in Herman Melville’s 1853 short story Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street: “I would prefer not to”. Many artists and curators in Kampala do not directly oppose the market; they sidestep it. They build parallel systems, not out of purity but necessity. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests in his 1999 book Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, such gestures preserve “potentiality”: the capacity to act otherwise, to not fully submit to dominant structures.

Zikusanze if you do, Zikusaanze if you don't!!, 2025, installation view. Photo: Ocen Jacob Siyoi © the artists. Courtesy Nantume Violet

Further, to quote the artist and educator kąrî'kạchä seid'ōu: “… art, when strictly thought of as commodity, necessarily encloses that which must, in principle, be accessible and usable to all of humanity, consecrating it for only the few who have arbitrarily acquired the privilege of exclusive ownership. And this has been the oracle of inequality for at least three centuries now. The ‘gift’ regime is about sharing; about artists making the property form of art inoperative. In this egalitarian paradigm, everybody possesses the means to offer and/or receive a gift.”

It has been a subtle but decisive shift over the past decade. Artists are no longer only producing work, they are producing the conditions under which that work can exist. Spaces are opened, some temporarily. Coalition exhibition teams happen, then dissolve. The exhibition, once a neatly contained event, becomes an ongoing situation. Where painting once dominated – aligned with colonial legacies of genre, medium specificity and object-based production – contemporary practices increasingly move towards process, participation, institutional critique and relational aesthetics. Exhibition formats unfold across studios, streets and digital spaces. Artworks manifest as texts, walks, public talks, discussions, cookouts, videos, music scores, sonic landscapes performances, publications and temporary occupations – and things that are not entirely any of these. In this expanded field the exhibition becomes less an event and more an organism and assemblage of encounters, unscripted events and real situations.

They might not produce consistent sales data, institutional reports or collectible objects. Outputs are often ephemeral and collectively authored. In short, they resist capture. This resonates with broader continental shifts, such as those articulated by seid'ōu’s in his notion of the “cultural slum” – a paradoxical space where precarity enables radical experimentation outside the grid of institutional framework. Rather than viewing lack as deficiency, it becomes a condition for invention. Or one might call it a form of refusal – to fully comply with the demands of visibility, productivity and export, a stance preserves, according to Agamben, the power not to act – or rather, to act otherwise.

Wasswa August Donald, Zikunta: Gale of man, 2016 (Installation view). Photo: Papa Shabani © the artist. Courtesy Nantume Violet

Precarity, in this sense, is not simply a condition to overcome, but one that produces something generative. Without the weight of maintaining the appearance of stability, the art scene can move quickly, experiment freely and reset. It invents new organisational forms rather than inheriting old ones. It can ask, quite radically: “What else can art do besides be made and sold?”

Kampala’s art world, in continuing to diverge from the possibility that art might exceed the roles assigned to it has a different horizon – one where artistic production is not entirely subsumed by capital, where value is negotiated collectively and where the boundaries of art remain contingent. It embodies the necessity to continue building systems that function on their own terms, strengthening networks of artist-led initiatives; documenting and theorising local practices; insisting that cultural, intellectual and communal values and their forms escape capitalist logic and, in some sense, remain non-cooperative. If Kampala’s art scene is still “emerging”, it may be because it has chosen not to arrive where it was expected.