Artist Acaye Kerunen with her work Ayelele
(2023) at the Barbican Centre in London.
Photo: IMAGEPLOTTER/ALAMY
Artist to Watch: Acaye Kerunen’s Striking Work Focuses on Liberating Women in Uganda
The talent and activist will present a solo exhibition at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in November
Artist and activist Acaye Kerunen’s wide-ranging practice is centered on liberating women across her native Uganda. “Women are burdened with the expectation to compromise,” she says, noting the country’s patriarchal nature means laws predominantly favor men, particularly in regard to land ownership. “They must constantly negotiate power.”
The artist’s January 2025 show at Pace London, “Neena, Aan Uthii”—which translates from Alur as “See Me, I Am Here”—was not a negotiation but a declaration. Here, she featured a suite of new works, including sound installations, a performance, and textile sculptures that provided the exhibition’s physical and conceptual structure. The Pace show marked Kerunen’s U.K. debut and her first solo outing with the megagallery, which started representing her, in collaboration with Blum and Galerie Kandlhofer, after her presentation at Uganda’s inaugural national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Acaye Kerunen with her work Ayelele (2023) at the Barbican Centre in London. Photo: IMAGEPLOTTER/ALAMY
For “Neena, Aan Uthii,” she worked with local artisans from across Uganda’s 65 Indigenous communities to produce the woven and hand-dyed elements in these pieces to call attention to their technical knowledge and understanding of the environment. The materials include a prevalence of raffia and palm leaves, and the dyes are made from natural sources like flowers and roots, all harvested from wetlands that are increasingly threatened by expanding monoculture farms that have degraded the soil in the pursuit of profit.
“Men are about owning, about who has what right now,” says Kerunen, who will present a solo exhibition at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in November. “Women are about preserving. We think long term, yet when it comes to the land we live on, we don’t have much of a say in it, no matter how much we know about it.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Spring Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Artist Acaye Kerunen with her work Ayelele
(2023) at the Barbican Centre in London.
Photo: IMAGEPLOTTER/ALAMY
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