The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presents “Sanaa Gateja: Language of We,” a solo exhibition of the Ugandan artist Sanaa Gateja that includes a dozen tapestries produced over the last eight years.
An important artist and cultural activist working in East Africa, Gateja came of age during the independence of Uganda and early in his adult life worked in the country’s Ministry of Culture, promoting arts and crafts. He subsequently studied design in Florence and London. While studying jewelry-making at Goldsmiths, University of London, Gateja was introduced to the paper-bead jewelry that became popular in England in the wake of World War II, when resources were scarce. The artist recognized the potential in paper-bead making to produce tradable objects with an inexpensive and nearly limitless resource—used and discarded paper—and simple processes. Enthralled by the African beadwork he had seen as a child, Gateja returned to Africa in 1990 and shared the method with women and youth in various communities and refugee camps, supporting them in developing local handicraft economies.
Gateja’s own works employ this same paper-beading method, and layer in inspiration from the basket weavers and blacksmiths of the village in which he grew up. The resulting dynamic and chromatically rich tapestries cut across numerous pictorial genres, including still life, portraiture, and abstraction. His distinctive and laborious method requires the involvement of artisans in his community, whom he has trained and employed since the early 1990s. Gateja and his studio community recycle all kinds of discarded papers, dye them through natural and synthetic processes, and roll them into three-quarter-inch beads. Following sketches he makes directly on swaths of bark cloth, a material traditionally used as a textile in East Africa, Gateja affixes the beads, often adding raffia and banana fibers. The results are materially complex and striking woven pictures that create deep connection with their environment and cultural lineages, while simultaneously foregrounding the global landscape of media and printed information in which we reside.
Sanaa Gateja (b. 1950, Kisoro, Uganda) was included in the Carnegie International in 2022 and represented the Ugandan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His works are held in museums and private collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Field Museum, Chicago; the National Scottish Museum, Edinburgh; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“Sanaa Gateja: Language of We” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.
