Ian Mwesiga: Au service des rêves (In the Service of Dreams)

Mariane Ibrahim presents, Au service des rêves (In the Service of Dreams), a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ugandan artist Ian Mwesiga. Across a series of enigmatic scenes, Mwesiga imagines stories balanced on the axis of reality, where memory fragments through shifting perspectives. Each work dissolves the boundaries of time as narratives flicker through a filmic fog.

With worlds suspended between light and shadow, memory and invention, every composition is poised between reality and recollection, neither fully anchored nor entirely adrift. Ian Mwesiga’s body of work has been strongly figurative in its representation of human figures, in these new works we witness an exploration that finds an expressive and eloquent vocabulary in shadows and silhouettes. Figures in Ascension (2025) and View from the window (2025), appear in passage between separate realties, caught between worlds. As the silhouettes descend into nature or disappear into shadows, each body marks a quiet transition.

In the legacy of Senegalese filmmaker, Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose words, Cinema is magic in the service of dreams, inspire the title of the exhibition, Mwesiga echoes Mambéty’s rhythms in his layering of detail and time. The artist disrupts stillness, splintering and reassembling the ordinary, where subtle shifts remain as layered fragments.

Interiors within Au service des rêves (In the Service of Dreams), offer clues to how time has unfolded within private milieu. View from the front, When the chairs turn, and Morning shadow II (all 2025) are traces of shifts from presence to absence where the lingering weight of memory relies on the objects. With most witnesses out of sight, only objects remain in the silence held between the canvas and the viewer.

With technical precision, Mwesiga invites the gaze toward the edge—where shadows begin and perception shifts. The viewer becomes a voyeur, watching figures suspended between arrival and departure. As a participant in this nonlinear narrative, the viewer pieces together memories and possibilities that unfold like cinematic memory.

This exhibition offers invitations rather than answers — to wander, to linger, to feel the pull of thresholds and the expansion of the interstitial moments. Each canvas is a passage, a moment of becoming, where the edges of reality soften.

marianeibrahim.com