New Visions: Circle Art Gallery
Featuring artists:
Ethel Aanyu, (Ugandan, b.1994)
Liberatha Alibalio, (Tanzanian, b.1994)
Pamela Enyonu, (Ugandan, b. 1985)
Fetlework Tadesse, (Ethiopian, b. 1988)
Sandra Wauye, (Kenyan, 1996)
Birhane Worede, (Ethiopian, b. 1998)
The gallery’s commitment to nurture emerging artists and their budding practices aligns with its broader mission of exhibiting and promoting visual artists from Eastern Africa. Four of the six participating artists debut at the gallery in this show.
New Visions offers a cross-section of work in photography, digital collage, painting, mixed media and textile arts, inviting viewers into introspective moments and extending that to broader relational concerns. Rigorous and reverential in their working methods, these artists stretch their approaches to media and narrative, engaging with a collection of cares such as; grief, ritual, memory, interdependence, lineage, nationhood, and self-presentation.
Painters Fetlework Tadesse, Sandra Wauye, and Birhane Worede reanimate portraiture and figuration with their considered and layered approaches. There is a quiet reflectiveness in the subjects inhabiting Birhane's interiors, a crowded, dreamlike essence in Sandra’s paintings and the geometric, allegorical pairings in Fetlework's compositions hint of passion and conflicted feelings. These painters disrupt what sometimes reads as a saturated genre. Similarly, Ethel Aanyu and Liberatha Alibalio extend the language of photography and include alternative processes for their final compositions. Aanyu begins by staging self-portraits and working with sitters to make photographs and proceeds to incorporate digital collage techniques to mediate moments of introspection while Alibalio taps into traditions of quilting, assembling family photographs from the 1980s and 1990s alongside other intentionally collected ephemera from her grandmother’s home in Kagera, Tanzania. Equally refreshing in their mixed media approach are Pamela Enyonu’s refined and delicate collages on canvas consisting of paper, pen, acrylic and gold leaf. Here, Enyonu sets out to unfurl visual narratives that explore Uganda’s histories and mythologies in this contemporary moment.
Ethel Aanyu, (Ugandan, b. 1994)
Ethel Aanyu is a Ugandan photographer living and working in Kampala, Uganda. In 2018, she completed a BA in Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University. Aanyu’s approach to photography is two-pronged. Using a digital camera, she first makes portraits of herself and other sitters staging scenes that channel specific emotions. This is followed by the application of digital layering techniques to modify the portraits, primarily inverting, re-ordering and re-presenting black and white images, as well as some experiments with colour.
Aanyu describes the process and the final compositions as a visual portrayal of self-reflection and inner-conflict, sometimes calm and gentle, other times intense and heated. Grappling with hybrid cultures of language and rural and urban life, having grown up in Teso, Eastern Uganda, and moved to Kampala, as well as studying longer histories of the post-colonial condition in Uganda, Aanyu aims to carve out space, not for resolution, but rather one of comfort amidst the tension, ambiguity and hybridity of these events.
Aanyu was a participating artist in the Kampala Art Biennale, 2020, and in 2023 completed a residency at 32 Degrees East. She has exhibited widely in Uganda, and in 2024 participated in the Jauo Photo Festival, Tunis as well as the Investec CapeTown Art Fair. This is her first showing with Circle Art Gallery.
Liberatha Alibalio, (Tanzanian, b. 1994)
Liberatha Alibalio is a contemporary textile and multimedia artist living and working in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Her work is driven by research, prioritising the exploration of materials and techniques in the development of new work and often working with textiles, performance and video. Embodying her connection to place, traditional cultural practices and storytelling traditions, Alibalio additionally reflects on history and memory as a way to draw together contemporary narratives from different contexts.
These textile works were made in response to the 2022 Congo Bienalle themed - “The Breath of the Ancestors”. Drawn from family photographs made in the 1980s and 1990s that recorded events such as baptisms, initiation ceremonies and traditional rites for marriage. With this as the seed, Alibalio goes further to assemble textured quilts incorporating collected ephemera from her grandmother’s home in Kagera, Tanzania. Using both hand and machine stitching, the quilts entitled RE/MIX I - VII, consist of cotton fabric dyed with botanical dyes and rusted metal, bark cloth, other found fabric and photographs. Intuitive and improvisational in her approach, for example using rust as a dying tool, Alibalio continues in a long tradition of quilting as a medium to hold history, memory, and intergenerational care.
Alibalio graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a BSc. in Textile Design and in 2018. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies nationally and internationally including East Africa Art Biennale 2019, Nafasi Art Space, Tanzania, 2021, Modzi Arts, Zambia and Deveron Projects, UK. She was part of the second edition of Congo Biennial, DRC, 2022 and in the same year was nominated for the Henrike Gross Art Award and participated in the 2022 Asiko Art School with CCA Lagos Nigeria.
Sandra Wauye, (Kenyan, 1996)
Sandra Wauye, a painter and ceramicist based in Mombasa, Kenya, attends to grief and trauma processing in her practice that unfolds at the intersection of community, cultural practices and healing rituals in contemporary society. Wauye’s expressive painting style in oil and oil pastel sticks features bold colours applied in thick loose strokes, and thinner controlled outlines, composing tableaus that fuse human and animal forms against vibrant, multi-coloured undefined environments.
In Companions of the Earth, 2024, a great stylistic example of her work, Wauye paints two black women in vibrantly patterned garments, one in profile and the other facing outwards and in between them a dog, all this laid on a simulated textured background consisting of blue, pinks, yellows and green loosely blended hues. The somber expressions on the faces of the two women as well as the dog suggest an attunement and reflection of an emotional bond, the relationship between humans and dogs as companions is one that is long documented.
In 2024, Wauye was one of three artists who participated in UJUZI, an artistic research and mentorship program with Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute and Untethered Magic which culminated in an exhibition at NCAI. She completed a residency at 32 Degrees East in Kampala in 2023, and in 2024 was a participating artist in the KLA ART Festival themed Care Instructions.
Pamela Enyonu, (Ugandan, b. 1985)Pamela Enyonu is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Kampala, Uganda. Her research-based practice engages with themes of identity, history, and gender, openly referencing writers such as Okot p'Bitek', Maya Angelou, Chinua Achebe and Frantz Fanon (to name a few) and weaving abstracted ideas from these texts into her compositions.
In a new series of works completed in 2024, Enyonu structurally looks to Jennifer Nansubuga’s Kintu, a six part novel that consists of intergenerational stories starting in 1750 and moving through the modern era to 2004 to create the first of a multi-chapter exhibition project. With this sensibility, Enyonu assembles meticulously layered collages on canvas consisting of paper, gold leaf, ink, and acrylic, returning to Ugandan mythology, not to reconstruct it, but instead integrate it into the current moment, and in this hybridity, explore its ruptures and continuities. Thematically, Enyonu revisits Uganda’s pre-and post-colonial history, from its social interactions to its foundational myths, and maps out a visual representation of this self-understanding through her identity as a hyphenated being.
In 2018, Enyonu received the inaugural Makumbya Musoke Art Prize. Since then, she has workshopped, exhibited and done residencies in Africa, Europe and the UK, notably Africa 1:1 in Venice and the DKC Residency at York University, 2023. Her work is part of notable public and private collections, including; the Moleskine Foundation Italy, Valmont Foundation, Switzerland, and Ca’Pesaro Museum, Italy.
Birhane Worede, (Ethiopian, b. 1998)Birhane Worede lives and works in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia. He received a BFA from the Alle School of Fine Arts in 2016 where he graduated with honours and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Art at the same institution.
Worede’s intimate and affective portraits are rendered in a reductive stylistic approach, grounding colour, gesture and surface quality. He sees his process as one akin to abstraction, applying oil paint on canvas in loose washy strokes and using suggestive lines and tonal shifts to define the composition, often a solitary figure in a domestic interior setting. Worede’s works also play with mood, oscillating between cool and warm palettes
“Throughout my work, I expressed interest in self-discovery and the everyday occurrences of the surrounding world. Growing up, living and working as a studio artist in the biggest market place of Africa “Merkato” Addis Ababa influences my work. Human life and emotions are main inspirations… I want my work to create consciousness … self-awareness, curiosity for others’ self- examination.”
Worede has exhibited locally and internationally with group shows in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Memphis, USA, London, UK and Johannesburg, South Africa. This is his first showing with Circle Art Gallery.
Fetlework Tadesse (Ethiopian, b. 1988)Fetlework Tadesse is a painter and sculptor living and working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She holds a Diploma in Fine Arts specializing in sculpture from Entoto Technical and Vocational Training College as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design.
Tadesse’s pithy narrative paintings, boast an impressive hand and sound grasp of semi-realist composition, with every inch of the canvas pulsing and activated. Working in a controlled pallet of reds, greens, blues, purples and a unique yellow outline, Tadesse renders elaborate large-scale paintings in which the human figure and background are equally weighted and codified. Appearing as the primary sitter in most paintings, sometimes mirrored, prostrate, crouched or seated, she often presents herself blindfolded and partially bound–positions that reflect her attitude towards daily routine and other observations from everyday life. She draws inspiration from observing mundane patterns, body movements, fashion trends, and working through controversial ideas, which she incorporates into her art as conversations with different selves. Colour, form, and body gestures also serve as key inspirations for her work, allowing her to explore anatomy and structure while expressing different emotions and perspectives. A recurrent motif, among other context clues that leave room for interpretation, is a series of layered translucent shapes that suggest the work occurs and can be read on multiple planes.
Tadesse has exhibited widely in Ethiopia in various group exhibitions since 2004, and in 2024, had her first solo exhibition, “Living dummies” at Findika Cultural Center, Addis Ababa, and showed at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. In February this year, she has an upcoming dual exhibition with Tiemar Tegene at the Gebre Kristos Desta Museum in Addis Ababa.
