In conversation: Samra Mayanja and Sepake Angiama, Artistic Director, iniva

Exploring themes of lostness, Mayanja and Angiama dive into The Living and the Stale, Mayanja’s first major solo exhibition.

The exhibition centres around Mayanja’s research into Ham Mukasa (c.1870-1956), the secretary-scribe for Uganda.

In 2021, Mayanja went on a lone expedition to Uganda, visiting sites significant to Mukasa’s life, and at the same time encountering the previously unknown interior world of her deceased father. During this journey, Mayanja produced her moving image work The Living and the Stale.

The exhibition centres around this key work, the galleries treated as the inside of a dispersed film, playing out Mayanja’s autobiographical journeys as scattered, stuck and expanded narratives.

About

This event is being filmed.

Sepake Angiama‘s praxis stems from radical pedagogies, black feminist thought and rethinking human/non–human relations, rooted in how we might reimagine and inhabit the world otherwise. She is the Artistic Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva), dedicated to developing commissions, artistic research, radical education practices, collective study, publishing and community-led commissioning that reflects on the social and political impact of globalisation.

Samra Mayanja is a writer and artist. Her work records and fictionalises the narratives that the living conjure in order to deal with loss. She also observes and presents the poetics that life offers us. Mayanja’s work is the residue from translations between writing, drawing, animation, pedagogy, film, installation and performance. Her practice is heavily supported by the instability of these translations and how the limits of each medium give life to the next. She has exhibited and performed widely, including at MAMA (Rotterdam), Kampnagel (Hamburg) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and lectured at Glasgow School of Art, Museum of London, University of Leeds and UP Projects (London).

Samra Mayanja: The Living and the Stale is part of The Tetley Jerwood Commissions programme, supported by Jerwood Arts’ Development Programme Fund

Our bar will be open before and after the event.

The event is being filmed.

Access

• This event is taking place in our City Workshop on the Second Floor.
• The event is being filmed and will be published on our YouTube channel with subtitles at a later date.
• There are accessible toilets on our Ground and Second Floors.
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