The exhibition Ateker, ijasi biyayi? – Greetings from the road (A dedication) marks a homecoming for Pamela Enyonu, showcasing her works in her first solo exhibition in the country. Drawing from the artist’s archive, the exhibition includes older pieces with a completely new body of work that sets out to explore Ugandan history and self-understanding narrated through Enyonu’s particular gaze against the backdrop of her hyphenated being, in a country whose borders were drawn in someone else’s sketchbook. Based on readings as diverse as Okot p’Bitek’s Songs of Lawino through Maya Angelou, Chinua Achebe and Frantz Fanon (to only name a few) the artist’s works gaze into the shards of the broken mirror we like to call home – from its social interactions to its foundational myths.

Spiritually akin to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu, Enyonu doesn’t return to those myths to reconstruct them, but instead summons them in the Now to explore their ruptures and continuities. Her Goddess Nambi cuts through the hazy threshold of the divine and earthly planes with a handful of golden seeds, wearing a blue tank top, piercing her eyes into the spectator. In her peripheral vision: the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil) with its golden fruits evoking another creational myth whose incursion into the lives of the people now known as Ugandans has redirected its trajectory onto a questionable timeline leading from an alien past to an uncertain future.

The artist then turns her eyes to the world of humans looking for loopholes from the deeply personal into the heart of the collective. Enyonu’s tapestries with botanical drawings of Matooke – in what the artist calls Social Nature Studies – can be read as a love letter to the foods that construct community. Observing her neighborhood in the outskirts of Kampala, Enyonu’s gaze wonders across roof tops that appear behind high fences crowned with barbed wire that is meant to provide security yet cuts divisions between the people who can provide it.

Searching to express home in this splintered reality, the artist is not trying to make sense of its chaos but instead allows fragmentation to enter a poetic polyphony. In this song, sung in and out of tune, creation is not a point of origin; it is woven through time. It is placed in acts of translation and deferral. It is to be found in the process of relearning one’s mother tongue while thinking in other languages. In Enyonu’s words, home is a work in progress. In an overflowing act of female writing, she spins her narration openly, without providing a certain direction, weary of forming discourse, speaking truths in many tongues.
Ateker, ijasi biyayi? – Greetings from the road (A dedication) is the first of a multi-chapter exhibition and research project that will further unfold in the future. We begin with the dedication: A dedication to Ugandans and Ugandanness in all its multiplicity and its contradictory self that doesn’t owe anyone an explanation.

pamelaenyonu.com