Exhibition puts election posters in the limelight

A Ugandan artist is offering commentary on Uganda’s democracy, as well as the display and destruction of photographs that clutter public spaces during every general election cycle.

Canon Griffin Rumanzi’s photography exhibition at the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala/Ugandan German Cultural Society (UGCS)/Alliance Francaise in Kampala, will close on October 21.

The photographs that have been on display since September 21 are those of posters that Rumanzi started capturing from 2016.

The exhibition titled “#PoliticianEyes (Let ME Help you Lead you)” aims at an artistic stimulation of active citizenship. It highlights a more humane political process by showing a curious local phenomenon of the design, vandalism, decay, and placement of the election poster as part of a façade of democracy. 

The vandalism of the posters is also a major theme, with a shot of Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine’s layered over those of President Museveni’s taking the biscuit.

“I found it that way along Kampala Road, opposite Fido Dido. It was illustrating the hallowing reality of rumours that the former pop star is just another prop in Yoweri Museveni’s political life. Different faces, same life force,” Rumanzi told Sunday Monitor, adding, “Depending on which depth or height you see things at. On the surface, it’s one campaign poster vandalised to reveal what had been pasted over.”

Tragicomedy 

It’s not just what Rumanzi calls a “tragicomedy” in which one set of posters is put on the back of another that dominates the bill. A poster of the NRM’s Salim Uhuru with a rope tied around it captures what Rumanzi reckons are “many competing tendencies in a laissez faire society.”

He adds: “A politician’s picture is there in all its honour, and bam! A street loan shark or ‘African doctor’ pastes their own message over. It’s a statement about how lives carry on despite the power struggles. So many suggestions and contradictions.”

The choice to deface posters per Rumanzi should not be reduced to “the expression of careless violence, dread, and misanthropy” especially since “there are places where people attempt to conserve and maintain” posters.

“From untiringly trying to put purpose to life, to the bleakness of struggling to survive while disconnected from the best advances in how people conduct life today, there is a lot to be discussed,” he notes, adding, “There’s love, there’s hate, the inattentive in between, and apathy, then what lies beneath and beyond. That is the question.”

Rumanzi told this newspaper that he has “about five digital collages emanating from the photography series […] and documentary pictures” on display at the exhibition.

“It happened spontaneously. Back in 2014, I was in Mbale District when I saw very mean faces of campaign posters and just wanted to make a fun post on my Instagram that, ‘In the imbalu nation, they like their leaders unfriendly.’ Then I contemplated that the caption may be funny, but may be too politically incorrect to set in text,” he said of how the idea of the exhibition crystallised.

Adding: “But then the posters suddenly became too conspicuous and some had panicked faces, others looking really malicious, others kind and too good to take the heat of Ugandan politics. So, I saw it was all more diverse, politician’s eyes were as diverse as Ugandans. So I went on to study the subtleties of it further with the hashtag #PoliticianEyes to keep track. Evidently, the story got meaty.” 

Not superficial 

Rumanzi reckons his arm form is “an application of photography,” with his body of work demanding an “artistic research” that goes deeper than the subterranean.

“I have Taoist tendencies, a non-interventionist approach. It’s regrettable that we take politics as a chance to exploit society instead of a realm of formulating social order,” he said, adding, “Democracy is incomprehensible to the general sub-Saharan consciousness, we are still those tribal societies with our dances and a certain darkness that looms beneath every man in a suit in a boardroom or whoever is reading this newspaper.”  

Regarding the littering of the urban centres with these posters during and after general elections and how it should be solved, Rumanzi said: “Right now, we wouldn’t be having this show without it, but I thought about it a lot. I arrived at the premise that it’s still beyond our civic status. If we’re still struggling with the basics, how are we gonna allocate resources to this? Like, a road is broken somewhere because a culvert has broken or somebody stole a manhole cover somewhere and then KCCA finds the personnel to go around worrying about these posters?”

“It is a crazy thing like how the problems Ugandan leadership was dealing with in 1989 are still here. It’s a gradual effort and just as those problems have reduced, if we don’t destroy what we have built, a time will come when it will not be possible to wantonly display information in the Ugandan cities and other communities,” he added.

Who is Canon Griffin Rumanzi?

Canon Griffin Rumanzi photographs, draws, paints, writes, and videos avidly. He constantly posts and shares these through social media such as UrbanUnkindness. He holds art in the highest and undeniable regard as the most unbridled form of sharing the experience and aspiration of our being; he is motivated by the mysteriousness of our presence, and all the possibilities. 

He collaborates with Andrea 

Stultiens on a platform they founded in 2011; History In Progress Uganda (HIPUganda), which collects and publishes photographs from collections and archives in Uganda. By doing this, HIPUganda opens up possibilities to relate to, react to, and think about Uganda’s history in photographs.  

Rumanzi trained in Graphic Design and Advertising at APTECH Uganda from 2010 to 2012. He is informally and self-taught in digital photography, videography and video.