ACAYE KERUNEN: NEENA, AAN UTHII
Pace Gallery (5, Hanover Square) in London presents Acaye Kerunen: Neena, aan uthii, the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in the UK. On view until February 15, 2025, the exhibition will feature a new body of sculptures, sound installations, and performance that interlace living forms of knowledge embedded within Ugandan communities. Translated from Alur as See me, I am here, this show marks Kerunen’s debut presentation with Pace since joining the gallery’s program in 2022.
Based in Kampala, Uganda, Kerunen’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses visual and performance art, curation, and activism. The sculptures Kerunen has created for Neena, aan uthii are vivid tapestries of embodied knowledge, incorporating a diverse range of natural materials and techniques that demonstrate her ongoing commitment to climate-conscious practice.
Kerunen often collaborates with artisans from across Uganda s sixty-five primary comm unities who source materials including palm leaves, sorghum and millet stems, sisal, raffia palm, grass, banana fiber and rinds, and barkcloth from their natural habitats. They prepare these by stripping, dying, braid ing, weaving, tanning, or crocheting. These essential components—each imbued with cultural, sociolog ical, and ecological significance—form the basis of her sculptural assemblages. Transformed from their organic or functional origins, they undergo a conceptual reimag ining that celebrates material, process, and surface as a unified whole.
The artist likens her finished works to “simultaneous equations,” intricate systems requiring the precise coordination of countless variables to achieve balance. The lang uage of mathematics permeates her sculptures and performances, evident in the numerical precision of weaving patterns and the harmonic structures underlying her sung sound works. Across artisan communities and individual textile practices in Uganda, intricate configurations of pattern, number, and form are passed down as living, embod ied knowledge. While grounded in universal principles, this knowledge remains dynamic, evolving as it interacts with new makers and ideas. Kerunen’s installations knit together examples of these sophisticated mathematical processes, regenerating traditional harmonies to hig hlight their timeless ingenuity.
Deep indigos, tangerines, fuchsias, and greens illuminate the works in Neena, aan uthii. Kerunen’s use of color reflects her deep engagement with the chemistry of natural systems. Eschewing the partitioning of colors into primary or secondary categories, she works with dyes derived from a rich palette of roots, flowers, grasses, and ash, sourced from across Uganda s diverse ecological regions. The resulting hues carry layered contexts, their subtle variations revealing the environmental and chemical conditions of their making.
Time emerges as both a medium and a thematic element in Kerunen’s work, interwoven throug h the tactile acts of knotting, thread ing, sewing, and weaving. These processes not onIy document the temporal rhythms of their making but also embody collective memory, passed down thro ugh generations. Dependency on such mercurial factors as climate, harvest yields, and supply chains imbues her work with an awareness of temporal frag ility. Raffia and thread become tools for recording lived experiences, capturing the nuanced relationship between human labor and the natural world. Throug h these acts, Kerunen offers an alternative archive—one that honors impermanence and transformation while reclaiming time as a space for reflection, healing, and resistance to colonial and patriarchal temporalities.
Accompanying the sculptural installations on view, Kerunen has composed and created sound works that continue and relate to the storytelling of each work.
Acaye Kerunen s (b. Kampala, Uganda) multidisciplinary practice, spanning visual and performance art, sound, film, movement, poetry, curation, activism, and therapy, has established the artist as a leading voice in contemporary artmaking. She has created music, film, and theater productions and has been published in multiple international outlets.
The processes of deconstruction and reconstruction are central to Kerunen’s practice. Her work seeks to disassemble the colonial and patriarchal structures that have long inhibited women’s freedom and artistic expression in East Africa and the Great Lakes reg ion. Throug h her practice, Kerunen investigates the impact of colonialism on African women’s artistry, which historically confined practices like weaving to functional purposes rather than recognizing their potential as expressions of artistic creation. Kerunen actively disrupts these narratives by recontextualizing traditional artistic techniques within contemporary art spaces. She works collaboratively with communities of women across Uganda to produce the handcrafted, woven, and dyed, and materials that appear in her installations and scul ptures.
Kerunen was selected to represent Uganda at the 2022 Venice Biennale alongside Collin Sekajugo, resulting in Uganda s inaugural pavilion receiving a special mention for best national participation. Kerunen returned to Venice in 2024 to curate Uganda’s pavilion for the 60th edition, presenting a kaleidoscopic view of sculpture, architecture, art, and artisanship. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, called A NI EE (I AM HERE), was presented by Blum Gallery, Los Angeles (2023). Her work has also been selected for group exhibitions at Ars Belga, Brussels (2023); and the Barbican Center, London (2024), which showcased the intricate installation, Ayelele (2023).
