March 1–April 27, 2025
Is Wakaliga Uganda a contemporary artist? Prior to this show—and a concurrent, unaffiliated one at Kunstmuseum Luzern—the Kampala-based film studio had never mounted an exhibition. For twenty years, it has been making movies, as it calls them, in the neighborhood for which it is named. Its founder, Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana, aka Nabwana IGG, writes, produces, directs, and edits every production, and has gained the nickname “Uganda’s Tarantino.”
Back in 2005, after obtaining a camcorder and watching a few online video editing tutorials, Nabwana IGG founded Ramon Film Productions, and started directing local music videos for hire. Several years later, he began enlisting volunteers from the neighborhood to serve as cast and crew on original, action-packed feature films such as Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010) and The Return of Uncle Benon (2011), each made on a budget of under 200 dollars. The studio earned cash by charging admission to local screenings at jerry-built video halls and selling hand-burned DVDs at nearby markets. Nabwana IGG also began uploading full movies to YouTube. A few soon went viral, and things began to change.
Two years ago, Ramon Film Productions debuted a new name—Wakaliga Uganda—in tandem with its latest movie, Football Kommando (2022), at Documenta 15. The hour-long film premiered on a flatscreen monitor surrounded by rows of cheaply printed production photos, character sketches, and hand-painted movie posters on bark cloth. Eighteen of the studio’s regular cast and crew members were invited to host thirteen public workshops on low-budget filmmaking, later canceled due to “circumstances revolving around the Covid-19 pandemic.” Despite having never trafficked in the art world, Wakaliga Uganda seemed a natural fit for the Indonesian collective ruangrupa’s curatorial concept, which prioritized collaborative practices from the Global South, grassroots over gloss, social processes over any finished object. The curators were committed to remodeling notions of artistic praxis, but they remained careful with their words, describing Wakaliga Uganda as a “movie factory” and an “artistic and social experiment” in official texts.
Myriam Ben Salah, the exhibition’s chief curator, often foregrounds artists whose work metabolizes media cultures and conventions from the Global South; in the past two years, she has curated exhibitions by Neïl Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, and Dala Nasser, and was recently confirmed as the curator of Yto Barrada’s French Pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. These shows surveyed the global churn of music, movies, traditions, and other mythologizing forces from various vantage points in Africa and the Middle East. “If Uganda Was America” continues this tradition, while breaking from the pattern of showing established, mid-career artists. With Wakaliga Uganda, Ben Salah picks up where ruangrupa left off, nurturing an art-world newcomer and dressing it in the current stylings of video art. It’s a tricky operation, and one that underscores the shifting objectives of institutions, their anxieties about reforming old museological protocols, and the liberties and limitations that come with being contextualized as contemporary art.
Inside a custom-built, labyrinthine installation at the Renaissance Society, which occupies a high-ceilinged nave on the fourth floor of the University of Chicago’s oldest lecture building, seven Wakaliwood movies play on loop. Films are either displayed on flatscreen monitors or projected, listened to on headphones or out loud, and watched while sitting on one of several folding chairs or black pleather beanbags. Each work occupies its own “room,” divided by swaths of teal and tangerine-colored fabric draped over rudimentary wall frames. An orange carpet spans the entire installation; it’s a transformative touch—part of a display concept devised by hip Milanese architecture studio 2050+—that gives the beige linoleum floors some welcome warmth.
Such furnishings often run the risk of overwhelming the art in a fog of vibey immersion. Here, they succeed in warding off the white-cube sterility that could easily stultify Wakaliga Uganda’s work, while still serving as its backdrop. Although the whole armature harks to the Ugandan video halls in which Wakaliwood movies were first shown, the exhibition lacks the advantages that a cinematic environment provides—namely, a rapt audience and non-vibey immersion. As is true with most video art installations, all but the most committed museumgoers will receive a more ambient impression of Wakaliga Uganda’s oeuvre when wandering through the space, catching movies in their middles, maybe sitting down for a short while.
Even when seen in fragments, the movies still astound. They are marvels of frugal innovation, carrying fast-paced plots and frenzied action sequences often on a single camera. Special effects are crude, sound effects are synthetic, and blood is spilled from condoms—sourced for free from a regional health clinic—attached to actors’ torsos. Prop guns and helicopters are made from metal found at a scrapyard. Earlier classics, like the gangster showdowns Who Killed Captain Alex? and Bad Black (2016), were filmed in fuzzy 480p; in the age of 4K, the low resolution feels warm and tactile, like the rightful successor to 16mm. Some are in English, others Luganda—a Ugandan dialect—with subtitles added. Several include dubbed commentary by “video jokers,” fixtures of East African video halls who stand screenside with a mic and provide irreverent, ad-libbed commentary. Wakaliwood movies emulate the hyperviolent, heroist conventions of America’s 1980s and ’90s action-film boom, rejigging the Rambo era for a Ugandan stage. Here, VJ Emmie translates the result back to a newfound Anglophone audience, reversing the course of cultural influence. “You are watching Who Killed Captain Alex?, and the first VJ English—ever!” he exclaims, fifteen minutes in, between bouts of action. “This is how we watch movies in Uganda.”
For “If Uganda Was America,” the Renaissance Society commissioned a new Wakaliwood production, which shares the show’s title. The museum describes it as a “speculative satire that flips geopolitical hierarchies.” In between plots about cannibalistic “night dancers,” a commissioner’s kidnapping, and an elder who fashions functional guns from plant stalks, the film does touch on Uganda’s place in the global arena. But it is far more subdued, more dialogue-heavy, and more virtuous than the studio’s other films on view. Gone are the video jokers, the splashy VFX, and the blood baths. It’s higher-fidelity, too, shot in crystal-clear 4K with added drone footage; diegetic and non-diegetic sound is professionally mixed. These “improvements” register more as a loss. It’s not that Wakaliga Uganda should relegate itself to cheap production for the sake of charm. But the studio should certainly be wary of getting swallowed up by institutional expectations, palatability, and sheen. Was this museum show a moment in the spotlight, or the first act of an enduring contemporary art career? Only time will tell, but thankfully one can still find several Wakaliwood films on YouTube either way.
