City Remixing _ Groningen

Koepelzaal, Minerva Art Academy, Groningen | April, 2016

City remixing is a double exhibition, initiated and curated by me, taking place first in Kampala (UG, March 2016), then in Groningen (NL, April 2016). The exhibition presents different ways of photographing the Urban environment in Uganda with three contemporary photographers responding to 2 historical collections of photos. The launch of the fifth book in the Ebifananyi series took place during the opening of the exhibition.

See, in addition to the slide gallery this link for a round view of one of the exhibition halls.

On 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 1928 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 4×5” 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’.

Thomas Aquilina(UK) is an architect. He researches the use and structure of Kampala’s urban space. With Alex Lyons (UK/Uganda) and Phumelele Mkhize (South Africa) he made respectively films and collages around the railway that divides the city in two parts, and the iconic arcade buildings of the city’s downtown area.