The Masters

The invited masters will each open their studios in Kampala for 10 days between May and August 2018. An open call will be put out for young artists to apprentice with the masters during their open studio time. The selected artists will be placed with the masters according to their skill and relation to the master’s practice.

The Masters are currently working on the projects they will share with young artists. Bili Bidjocka is thinking of giving a workshop about the making of books, from traditional Buganda barkcloth. Godfried Donkor works with collage and paintings. Abdoulaye Konate will transmit his unique techinique of working with textile. Myriam Mihindou will open her studio to performance art. Radenko Milak will teach the production of animated film using drawings. Aida Muluneh is a photographer known for her theatricalisation. Pascale Marthine Tayou is a genius in installation settings.

KAB18 seven Masters are:

Bili Bidjocka (Cameroon)

Bili Bidjocka, born in 1962 in Douala, Cameroon, is a visual artist based in Paris. He considers art as an enigma. His confrontation with market laws, history and his own African identity forced him to see with new eyes the notion of art. After painting, he turned to installation, theatrical staging, sound and digital creations. His pieces function as puzzles, riddles through which he continues the essential examination of the meaning and purpose of creation. Bidjocka is part of Documenta14, in Athens and Kassel, with The Chess Society, a digital project and two sites specific installations.


Godfried Donkor (Ghana/ UK)

Godfried Donkor, born in 1964, is a Ghanaian artist, living and working in London, who has exhibited in Cuba, Mexico, the US, Europe and Africa. He is known primarily for his work in collage, and has been described as similar to Keith Piper and Isaac Julien in his output. Taking inspiration from the people of Africa and Europe, Godfried Donkor’s influences encompass topics in relation to historical events and social issues. The commercialization of the human and the rise of the African American, are the most common themes used in his art. Working mostly in collage, Donkor uses mixed-media such as newspapers, lace, sheet music and other paper materials as a background to majority of his pieces. Donkor layers illustrations and photographic images that often juxtapose one another.


Abdoulaye Konate (Mali)

Abdoulaye Konaté was born in 1953 in Diré, northern Mali. During his artistic education that led him to Cuba, he discovered a history and practices that invited him to step out of his comfort zone; Africa was wider than its borders, and its culture had transformed and spread to the four corners of the planet. Beginning as a painter and installationist, he finally chose textile as his privileged means of expression, thus reconnecting with the secular traditions of his country. In the large frescoes he creates, he portrays traditions that have fallen into disuse, immortalizes a history that used to be transmitted orally, and looks at our contemporary world with the eyes of a wiseman.


Myriam Mihindou (Gabon)

Myriam Mihindou, born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon, to a Gabonese father and a French mother, lives and works in Paris. After studying architecture, she enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. Though she started working with sculpture and metal, the discovery of Land Art, Joseph Beuys, and Ana Mendieta, led her artistic exploration to nature through ritualized actions. Myriam Mihindou works with photography as well as performance, video, drawing and sculpture. Highly autobiographical, her creative process explores memory, identity, and the social, political and sexual body.


Radenko Milak (Bosnia Herzegovinia)

Radenko Milak, an artist born in Travnik (Yugoslavia), lives and work in Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The largest part of his artistic production consists of watercolours, mostly done on 100% cotton fibre 300gr Arches paper. His approach is very simple and generally based on a combination of black pigment and white paper. As a point of departure, he mostly uses various media sources like documentary photos, old newspaper, postcards, posters, movies… His works are made in series. He is particularly interested in the state of the image today, at the time of the digital revolution.


Aida Muluneh (Ethiopia)

Born in Ethiopia in 1974, Aïda Muluneh left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood. After several years in a boarding school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Canada in 1985. In 2000, she graduated with a degree in Communications with a major in Film from Howard University in Washington D.C. After graduation, she worked as a photojournalist at the Washington Post, however her work can be found in several publications. She is the founder and director of the first international photography festival, the Addis Foto Fest. She has published a book titled, “Ethiopia: Past/Forward,” which is a coffee table book that reflects her vision on reconnecting to Ethiopia through memory and nostalgia. Her latest works play with this notion of memories, by reinventing contemporary rituals through the characters that she depicts.


Pascale Marthine Tayou
(Cameroon)

Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon in 1966. He lives and works between Ghent and Yaoundé. Versatility characterizes his work. He explores all sorts of mediums – sculpture, installation, drawing, video – and although the themes vary, they all take as a starting point the image of the artist. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive, heterogeneous and eschews pre-established patterns. Tayou’s creations all have a common characteristic: they portray the image of man who travels around the world and explores the question of the global village. It is in this context that Tayou examines his African origins and the questions they raise. The Falling Houses consist of prints on wood. They sometimes evoke architectures and are composed of a multiplicity of images of various origins. These “dwellings” are a reference to Chinua Achebe’s famous novel, Things Fall Apart. “This house suspended from the ceiling is the house of dogmas, joys, respite, fears, frustrations, misfortune, happiness. This house is us, the human species.”