All. Rights. Matter. Centre for Art and Politics Seminar

Leilah Babirye made and exhibited the installation I care about you (2016) during the Artwork at Kampala Exhibition hosted at Makerere University in 2016. She used this work to publicly declare that she was gay (something that cost her admission for graduate training in 2018). She is currently exiled in the USA.

In her presentation, Dr Angelo Kakande, Associate Professor, Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University, Uganda, will raise issues of art, politics and law to speak about Babirye's work, her own work, and that of two others, Sheila Nakitende and Mzili Mujunga. These are the few visual artists who have dared to speak about gay rights in Uganda.

Dr Kakande is visiting the School of Art History this month (September 2023) as part of his 2023-2024 Global Fellowship at the University of St Andrews. He is an artist, art historian and lawyer, and an expert in histories of modern and contemporary art in East Africa. His artworks and publications have particularly engaged with the ways in which art functions in defense of individual and collective rights.

Dr Kakande joins us at St Andrews in connection with Dr Kate Cowcher's ongoing research project, Dar to Dunoon, investigating the African modern artworks in the Argyll Collection.