New Visions: Circle Art Gallery
Circle Art Gallery is delighted to present New Visions, from 22 January - 27 February 2025, featuring works by:
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.
Individual biographies will be listed below when they have been completed, please check again.
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.