Individual Project

Andrea Stultiens together with HIPUganda presents the exhibition CIty Remixing.

Opening reception 3 March, 17.00.

The exhibitions presents photographs made of and in Uganda's kapital city Kampala through time, as seen by 5 different photographers. The exhibition shows and wants to make its viewers think about progress and development of Kampala, and the possibilities and limitations of photographic visualisations of urban environments at large.

The opening of the exhibition in Kampala will also be the world wide launch of the fifth volume in the Ebifananyi book series, developed and designed by Andrea Stultiens, published jointly by HIPUganda and Paradox.

The Photographers:

Dr. A.T. Schofield (UK/Uganda) was a missionary and physician who worked under the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Uganda for quite some time during the first half of the 20th century. He was also an acomplished amateur photographer. He documented Kampala, but also other events and places based on his social surroundings (a visit by Lady Baden Powell to the Ugandan girl guides for instance) and interests (he made, among others, photographs of a milking ceremony in Toro and life in Karamoja). Part of his photographic legacy has been donated to the Africana section of the main library of Makerere University and digitised by HIPUganda. This made the material available for further research and for use in this exhibition. Eng. M.W. Wambwa was born in 1933 and is one of the first western trained engineers in Uganda.

Journalism and photography would have been his second career choice. During the first half of the 1960s he photographed on slides, creating a colourful image of Uganda around independence. He also wrote an extensive memoir. The photographs and fragments of the memoir form the core of the fifth book in HIPUganda’s Ebifananyi series.

Elsadig Mohamed (Sudan) is a photographer and filmmaker. In his photographs in this exhibition the focus is shifted. It is sometimes hard to be sure what exactly is seen. At the same time this makes it possible to see certain structures present in the city and the way it is photographed.

Luuk van den Berg (the Netherlands) is a design student at Minerva Academy in Groningen. He has a big interest in photography and was invited to rephotograph the historical photographs. He did this using a camera that produces very detailed 4x5” negatives. These negatives have more or less the same size as the glass plate negatives produced by dr. A.T. Schofield.

Rumanzi Canon (Uganda) is an artist and co-founder of HIPUganda. He zoomed out of what the historical photographs show, making places into planets, expands framed views in panoramic images, shooting, as he calls them ‘Holes in the world’.

HIPUganda looks for and digitises photocollections in Uganda to preserve historical photographic documentation, and shares that material to make increase the diversity of available materials relating to Ugandan history, activate it and potentially add value to it by crowsourcing information. HIPUganda was founded in 2011 by Rumanzi Canon and Andrea Stultiens and has been active on Facebook, through their website and exhibitions and events in Uganda as well as internationally.

Andrea Stultiens is a researcher, photographer and educator from the Netherlands. Since 2007 she has been working in Uganda a couple of months a year in, trying to understand and relate to a culture far from the one she grew up in. She is co-founder of HIPUganda and currently undertaking a PhD research that results in a series of books based on photo collections encountered in Uganda and a theoretical reflection on them. She initiated the project this exhibition is the result of, and invited Rumanzi Canon, Elsadig Mohamed and Luuk van den Berg to respond to the historical material.