In recent portraits from Uganda, it is rare that the subjects do not meet the gaze of the viewer. Instead, they seem deliberately posed, openly aware of their audience and how they will be perceived. Carson Buka breaks with this trend. In most of his portraits, the artist captures his sitters deeply lost in private interaction; some are even clearly combative and yet indifferent to the possibility of being watched.
For “Enkolangala”, the fourth exhibition of the Amasaka gallery, one of the few public spaces for contemporary art outside the capital Kampala, Buka invites us to reflect on the interactions between the individual, social mores and nature. human. Nodding to Masaka’s role as a hub of barkcloth production, the artist paints with and on the material, combining ancient tawny brown Buganda cloth with an everyday white canvas . He further accentuates this contrast through the representation with pop and almost comic accents of characters in primary hues.
Buka’s paintings subtly address the delicate struggle for control in the relationship between an art object and its viewers, paying particular attention to the pernicious influence of the pervasive representation of identity and difference produced and promoted. by the dominant markets. In this logic, the values shared between individuals or objects rooted in multicultural and multilingual communities are abandoned to a single linear narrative of a “people”. Buka’s portraits call for this fantasy, refusing to play by its rules. Rather than addressing viewers, the paintings force them to play the role of voyeurs, listening to the intimacy of others.
