Ugandan Gallery Afriart Is Championing African Artists at Art Basel Miami Beach
Potrait of Daudi Karungi. © Charlene Komuntale. Courtesy of Afriart.
Charlene Komuntale, exterior view of “Sit with Me - The Diary of a Free Thinker” at Afriart, 2023. Courtesy of Afriart.
When Art Basel Miami Beach opens this week, it will include a “very special presentation” by Ugandan gallery Afriart in the main Galleries sector alongside major names including Gagosian, Pace Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth.
While Afriart has shown at the fair for three consecutive years from 2021 to 2023 in the Nova and Positions sectors—dedicated, respectively, to galleries presenting work created within the last three years and galleries showing solo presentations by emerging artists—it is the first time that it will be participating in the fair’s main sector.
“It means that the community of Art Basel understands how serious we are with what we do,” said Daudi Karungi, founder and director of the Kampala-based gallery, which has built a reputation for introducing artists from Africa—particularly from the Eastern part of the continent—to international audiences.
Installation view of “Beyond Sculpture” at Afriart, 2024. Courtesy of Afriart.
The gallery will show work by artists who create with locally sourced materials. Ugandan artist Sanaa Gateja makes installations, tapestries, and sculptures from materials including wood, raffia, banana fiber, and beads from discarded paper, while Ethiopian artist fiker solomon makes tapestries from materials including jute, sisal, and cotton thread. Ugandan artist Richard Atugonza, meanwhile, works with found materials like sawdust, charcoal, and glass to create sculptures. Afriart’s booth is a collaboration with Rele, the Lagos-, London-, and Los Angeles–based gallery, showing work by three African artists in the same booth.
“I think that we have a strong presentation that will be a very successful one,” Karungi told Artsy. He anticipates that the booth’s connective theme of materiality will connect with the “very, very exciting [and] global audience” that attends Art Basel Miami Beach. He pointed out the diverse offerings being brought to the fair encompass a range of artistic mindsets, materials, engagement with their communities, and ages, ranging from the 30-year-old solomon to the 74-year-old Gateja. The works on view, he hopes, will lead to an “exciting result.”
How Afriart became a continental tastemaker
Before Afriart became a leading international contemporary gallery representing artists such as Ethiopian artist Kaleab Abate and Tanzanian artist Sungi Mlengeya, it was established primarily as a solution to a problem of its founder Karungi, and to an extent his art school colleagues.
In the early 2000s, Karungi needed a space to show and sell his artworks in Uganda but couldn’t find anywhere then. Taking matters into his own hands, he “opened a gallery to fix that for me,” he noted. “Little did I know that it was to fix it for many other people.”
With that background, Karungi came into his role with the mindset of a “gallerist [who] is an artist [and] also a business person.” He strives to ensure that he does everything within and above his power to help the artists he works with succeed—not only financially but also in terms of their well-being.
That is reflected in the programming of Afriart, which Karungi said has a model “that is more of an incubator,” compared to a traditional gallery that is solely focused on showing and selling work. “[About] 90% of the artists that we [represent] have gone through either our residence program or some sort of mentorship program.”
He pointed to Kampala-based projects including its Silhouette Projects artist residency program dubbed as its “professional growth division” and Surfaces concept development masterclass, a mentorship program that continue to be instrumental in the gallery’s success. These two initiatives, he said, equip the artists with knowledge and insights to ensure they are not found wanting on global stages or when they meet colleagues across the international art world.
The projects also have the advantage of feeding into a gallery that has a “mix of exciting gems,” some at “different stages of their development,” which keeps its roster “fresh.” The new, younger set of artists that the gallery represents, he added, “have a certain energy that they are bringing to this conversation of making art.”
Expanding the net internationally
Installtion view of “Shapes of Water” at Afriart, 2022. Courtesy of Afriart.
As part of the gallery’s strategy to ensure the visibility of artists it works with, artists represented or exhibited by the gallery are often featured in international shows at spaces including museums.
Emmie Nume, an artist on the gallery’s roster, just completed an 18-month residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency in Margate, U.K. The majority of artists—including Gateja, Odur Ronald, Collin Sekajugo, and Acaye Kerunen—who have represented Uganda at the Venice Biennale since its debut in 2022, he says, have a working relationship or were at some point represented by the gallery.
The gallery also maintains a robust schedule of international art fairs. In addition to Art Basel Miami Beach, it has participated in several global fairs, including Liste Art Fair, Art Dubai, ARCO Lisbon, Art X Lagos, Taipei Dangdai, EXPO Chicago, and Investec Cape Town. This strategy is paying off for the gallery.
“It is important to us because once we find that an artist has good work, then we are able to say, ‘Okay, how do we position them in the right places to meet the right collectors, institutions and people?’” Karungi said. “We have done that kind of work for a while and achieved some great success.”
In the past year, Afriart has also started publishing books related to its artists and exhibitions. The idea, Karungi noted, is so that future generations can read about the work of these artists and also prevent a situation where the artists and the work being done now are forgotten in decades due to the lack of access to information. It “completes [the gallery’s] mandate which is support, mentorship, visibility, and archiving,” he said.
